By Noah Charney. Gangsters, guns, violence, wit. Let me begin by praising Tall Tales: Now You Are, Now You’re Gone (Suplje Price: Zdej te je, a zdej te ni) for being thoroughly un-Slovene. It has action and pace, two rare attributes in the world of Slovene cinema, which too often […]
Keeping the Peace: A SXSW Interview on Peace Officer (2015)
By Jude Warne. Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber are no strangers to the investigative process; as immensely talented documentary filmmakers, this is part of what they do. Dub Lawrence, the subject of the team’s SXSW-screened film Peace Officer, is no stranger to this either, having been a police officer that […]
El Club: A Berlinale Review
March 26, 2015
By Zhuo-Ning Su. When No (2012) took the festival circuit by storm and eventually won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nomination some years back, there were probably a handful of us who remained unconvinced or even slightly mystified. The historical drama about the ad campaign that brought down Pinochet’s military […]
Little Release and Little Inspiration: Tempo Documentary Festival, Stockholm 2015
By Axel Andersson. It was still cold when Stockholm’s documentary film festival Tempo opened in early March. The miserable rain underlined the city’s forlorn dampness for both old and new inhabitants. Roma hounded out of their central European homes by prejudice and persecution to beg through an unforgiving Nordic winter […]
Call for Submissions to a Special Issue of the Journal of Popular Film and Television on Holmes Onscreen (Tentative Title)
Edited by Tom Ue, Department of English, University College London Heralded by The Telegraph as a “global phenomenon,” BBC’s Sherlock is now one of the most commercially and critically successful television series of all time. The global recognition of Sherlock, combined with the recent discovery of Arthur Berthelet’s 1916 silent […]
Ghost in the Light: Nina Forever (A SXSW Review)
By Paul Risker. From its opening breath, Nina Forever feels like a film that appeals not solely to our superficial and aesthetic gaze, but to our instincts. The opening sounds of a crash and the flashes of light that have become ingrained and associated with accidental tragedy offer a haunting presence. […]
The Site of Nature: Exteriority and Overexposure in The Thin Red Line
By Trevor Mowchun. “Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblematic.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature) There is a sense in which it could be said that the natural world is beyond […]
Premiers Plans 2015 Festival Report
March 15, 2015
By Joseph Pomp. Festival Premiers Plans d’Angers (literally, First Shots Festival of Angers—a city in northwestern France that more than makes up for its size in charm) is arguably the most important celebration of young filmmakers in Europe. Now in its twenty-seventh year, Premiers Plans boasts a list of alumni […]
Da Sweet Blood of Inspiration: A Conversation with Spike Lee
March 10, 2015
By John Duncan Talbird. Back in college, my friends and I went to see Do the Right Thing (1989) when it first came out. We’d been reading about the film for weeks before it arrived in the little Southern college town where we lived. Some critics were raving that this […]
Victoria: A Berlinale Review
March 9, 2015
By Zhuo-Ning Su. Calling German writer/director Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria the runaway sensation at this year’s Berlin Film Festival is overstating it a little bit, considering how critical response to the film was not nearly as unanimously amorous as to, say, Jafar Panahi’s Taxi or Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. That said, if […]