COLLECTED AND INTRODUCED BY AMIR GANJAVIE. Reza Mirkarimi’s Today (Emrooz, 2014) was selected to represent Iran at the 2015 Oscars despite being unpopular with Iranian critics from the beginning and despite expectations that it would be a great box office failure. According to the website of Hamshari, a leading Iranian […]
San Francisco Film Society: French Cinema Now – November 6-9, 2014
November 7, 2014
By Janine Gericke. The San Francisco Film Society’s Fall season begins with the seventh annual French Cinema Now series on November 6. As expected, this year’s lineup doesn’t disappoint, providing enough storytelling variety and star power to satisfy any San Francisco Francophile. The four-day event kicks off with Paris Follies […]
Fate and History: Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy
November 6, 2014
By Paul Risker. Cities rise, or fall, at the will of men. In a conflict of wills in 1944, Paris, the “City of Light,” was spared. Beyond the narrative presented in Volker Schlöndorff’s Diplomacy (2014) there inevitably lies a more compelling and intricate story of the events leading up to […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
By Anna Weinstein. Documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy made history in 2012 when she became the first Pakistani to win an Oscar for her documentary Saving Face. She won an Emmy for her 2010 documentary Pakistan: Children of the Taliban, and to date she has made more than a dozen films […]
Five Dimensions of Sentimental Boredom: Interstellar
By Daniel Lindvall. At some point early on in Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 (2009) we know that 999.85 per mille of the world’s population is doomed to perish in the coming flood. We also learn that, secretly, the governments of the most powerful nations on Earth, the G8, […]
Force Majeure (2014)
November 2, 2014
By Zhuo-Ning Su. Swedish comedic drama Force Majeure is a sneaky, unsparing, surgically accurate stab to a very particular part of the human sensibility, which makes it at once hilarious and deeply unsettling to watch. Written, directed and performed with remarkable intelligence and empathy, it tickles, provokes, cooks up delicious tension throughout, […]
“Turn It Off!” – Sound and Silence in 1960s British Gothic Cinema
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. It’s Halloween once again, and as one might suspect, American cable networks are offering a cornucopia of horror films, past and present, though the Universal films of the 1930s and 40s which started the entire horror cycle in America are now missing from most playlists. Val […]
The Representation of Men in the Films of Abdol Reza Kahani, Houman Seyedi and Bahram Tavakoli
By Asal Bagheri. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no. 3/2014, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Independent Iranian Cinema.] In an interview made in August 2013, Bahram Tavakoli declared that in his opinion, independent cinema does not […]
Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror: On Political Film in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
By Sara Saljoughi. [Editor’s note: This essay is published here in conjunction with the publication of Film International 69, vol. 12, no. 3/2014, a special issue devoted to Contemporary Independent Iranian Cinema.] The cinema of Jafar Panahi highlights two crucial strains of the problematic of Iranian independent cinema: the conditions […]
Still Powerful in the Political: Lucy Lawless on The Code
By Paul Risker. Lucy Lawless is no stranger to television. She has traversed time itself from swords and sandals (Xena: Warrior Princess, 1995-2001, filmed in her home country, New Zealand) and science-fiction (Battlestar Galactica, 2005-2009) to dramas down under in Jane Campion’s miniseries Top of the Lake (2013) and now Shelley […]