The New York Film Festival, September 27th – October 13th 2013

By Gary M. Kramer. The 51st New York Film Festival opens September 27 with the World Premiere screening of Paul Greengrass’ dramatic thriller, Captain Phillips and closes three weeks later with the World Premiere of Spike Jonze’s Her. In between, there are Gala Tributes (Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes), Views from […]

You and the Night (2013)

By Mark James. You can tell that Yann Gonzalez’s film, You and the Night (Rencontres d’après minuit, better translated as Encounters after Midnight) is a fantasy because of its central set-up: an orgy in which the participants reveal their emotional pasts. The cinematic possibilities of strangers meeting up for sex […]

The Making of Five Dances: An Interview with Alan Brown

By Tom Ue. Alan Brown’s first film, O Beautiful, won the Future Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, and was an official selection of the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. His debut feature, Book of Love, which stars Simon Baker, Frances O’Connor, Greg Smith, and Bryce […]

Richard C. Sarafian (1930-2013)

By Michael T. Toole. Richard C. Sarafian, the versatile Armenian-American director/actor whose most celebrated film, the exhilaratingly existential chase drama, Vanishing Point, is still one of the most actively discussed road films today, died on September 18, 2013 of pneumonia in Los Angeles. He was 83. Richard Caspar Sarafian was […]

Prisoners: At the End of a Slippery Slope

By Jacob Mertens. Moral relativism can make for a lousy film. Characters bark and growl about their actions being justified, the narrative halts to brood, the nature of God and sin are clumsily introduced, all for an elusive truth that might as well be out of the filmmakers’ reach. To […]

Selected Film Essays and Interviews (Bruce F. Kawin, 2013)

Book Review by Jez Owen.  This collection from academic imprint Anthem Press collates material written by the eminent University of Boulder resident lecturer, critic and theorist Bruce F. Kawin. Written between 1977 and 2001, the work included covers a cross-section of film specific topics; from those defining a film’s particular […]