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 […]
Documenting Fiction: Jaret Belliveau and Matthew Bauckman on Kung Fu Elliot (2014)
By Paul Risker. Going behind the scenes of Blood Fight, the latest film from amateur filmmaker and aspiring Canadian action hero Elliot Scott, Jaret Belliveau and Matthew Bauckman encounter the truth of cliché first hand in their documentary Kung Fu Elliot. Viewer sentiments like “fact is stranger than fiction,” “art […]
Banned Again: Kianoosh Ayari on Paternal House (2012)
March 4, 2015
By Amir Ganjavie and Leila Pasandideh. It has been a few weeks since Kianoosh Ayari’s Paternal House (2012) was banned from screening, for the second time. At first banned after its premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival by the Iranian government agency that funded the project, the film went back under Ayari’s control when he received approval to screen the […]
Il Sorpasso (1962)
March 3, 2015
By Jeremy Carr. Bruno Cortona (Vittorio Gassman) zips along deserted Roman streets in his Lancia Aurelia B24. In search of a telephone, he is a high-speed automotive speck dwarfed by towering housing complexes and businesses. Bruno maintains this frenetic pace whether he’s on foot, in his car, or speaking. He […]
So It Goes in What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
February 28, 2015
By Matthew Sorrento. In his essay “A Spanner in the Works?: Genre, Narrative and the Hollywood Comedian,” Frank Krutnik details how classical Hollywood comedies were built around a star comedian. Designed to showcase the talents of the star, these vehicles present him/her as a fish-out-water, to provide comic bits, and then […]
The Life of Paganini: Bernard Rose on The Devil’s Violinist (2013)
By Jude Warne. Bernard Rose is a firm believer of the interrelations of film and music. Music always seems to have been central to his approach to cinematic style. Rose got his start in filmmaking directing music videos such as UB40’s 1983 hit “Red Red Wine” and Frankie Goes to […]
A Future for Indigenous Media Studies: The Fourth Eye: Māori Media in Aotearoa New Zealand, Ed. Brendan Hokowhitu and Vijay Devadas (2013)
February 25, 2015
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. With a fascinating lineage spanning from the Treaty of Waitangi to the inception of the first ever state-funded Indigenous television station, New Zealand has proven itself a veritable incubator of the growing intersection between Indigeneity and media. It is therefore appropriate that editors Brendan […]
In Defense of Hitchcock and Serious Criticism
By Robert K. Lightning. “It follows that the critic should read without inappropriate bias. We cannot properly object to The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, because we think that John Bunyan’s theology is false: it is not a valid criticism of a work that it disagrees with the critic. What we […]