By Jeremy Carr. David Lynch, via the Criterion Collection’s newly released Blu-ray of Eraserhead (1977), includes a television calibration option as a supplemental feature. With this, Lynch emphasizes that what we are about to see is a visual experience. It is important, therefore, and rightly so, that we adequately prepare […]
Toward the Limit: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction
By Carol Vernallis. Michael Bay poses a problem. He is the second-highest-grossing director, after Spielberg, so it’s not surprising that critics and connoisseurs love to take him down. But neither supporters nor detractors have been able to say exactly what he does. Is he just good at making Hollywood blockbuster […]
Adam Saunders on Launching Footprint Features
October 23, 2014
Actor and producer Adam Saunders recently helped to launch Footprint Features, which is dedicated to creating “character-driven stories that appeal to a mainstream audience.” In conversation with Film International’s Paul Risker, Saunders discussed his new endeavour along with his previous career in film. Why a career in acting and producing? […]
Ida: The Woman’s Path?
By Christopher Sharrett. The films of Pawel Pawlikowski have only intermittently interested me. I found his Woman in the Fifth (2011) utterly empty. My Summer of Love (2004) had much to recommend it, that is, up to the point where lesbian sex is conflated with psychopathology (the film shares some […]
Benny Loves Killing (2012)
October 19, 2014
By Jude Warne. Benny Loves Killing is director Ben Woodiwiss’ debut feature British film, and has multiple festival awards to its name, including the award for best horror film at the Oregon Independent Film Festival. Despite this particular genre categorization of the film as a “horror film,” it is up […]
Remembering Mani Kaul: A Commemorative DVD Collection
October 18, 2014
By Elroy Pinto. On the first anniversary of his death, the Films Division of India released a DVD set that features all of Mani Kaul’s documentaries. However, it is important to note that Kaul’s visually formidable Mati Manas (1985) never made it to the DVD. Kaul, born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, […]
Kill the Messenger: Necessary Politics
By Christopher Sharrett. Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger strikes me as a necessary film at a time when the US political cinema is at a low ebb – excluding the many fine straight-to-DVD documentaries by Robert Greenberg and others, about the criminal wars on the Middle East by the Bush […]
The Tribe: Filmmaking in a Vacuum
October 13, 2014
By Zhuo-Ning Su. The Ukranian dramatic thriller The Tribe marks the arrival of a major directorial talent in Miroslav Slaboshpitsky, who delivers a feature debut here that’s artistically challenging, topically provocative, stylistically assured, and an all-around daring, alluring, searing work of vision. Set in an educational institution for the deaf […]
Van Gogh (1991)
October 12, 2014
By Christopher Neilan. Pialat is not celebrated in the US like Truffaut, nor adored in critical circles like Godard and Melville. He’s a palme d’or winner who emerged in the post-new wave environment – Truffaut, in fact, produced his first feature in 1968 – but one whose rigidly realist, langorously […]
Making Reality Work: Before I Go to Sleep
By Jakub Wojnarowski. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) Every human writes her own story. But how could one make this narrative coherent, if every chapter is being erased as soon as it is ready? That is what happens to Christine Lucas in Before I Go to Sleep (written and directed by Rowan […]