By Jacob Mertens. A month or so back, Slate posted an article in anticipation of Josh Boone’s film The Fault In Our Stars¹—based on John Green’s popular Young Adult book by the same name—in which author Ruth Graham used the timeliness of this release to shame adults about reading YA […]
Shoe-String Initiative: An Interview with Nikki Braendlin
By Anna Weinstein. Nikki Braendlin’s film As High as the Sky tells the story of Margaret, a woman struggling to control her OCD symptoms when her estranged sister and niece show up unexpectedly, causing her to finally acknowledge the root of her emotional problems. Starring Caroline Fogarty (from the series […]
Life As He Saw It
July 4, 2014
By Paul Risker. There is the frequently re-iterated question of what is the value of a life. The cinematic equivalent is the time given to telling a person’s life story. When you consider the time one expends personally and professionally, and in the case of former Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger […]
Seeing Your Doppelganger Can Only Spell Trouble: Enemy (2013)
July 3, 2014
By Janine Gericke. Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy opens with a quote from José Saramago’s novel The Double, which Enemy is loosely based on, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” Well, that peaked my interest. College history professor, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), leads a normal, yet fairly mundane, life. He spends his days […]
AFI Docs Film Festival 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. For the second year, AFI Docs showcased non-fiction shorts and features at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD, and at various Washington, D.C. venues. The festival was bookended with celebrity portraits, as director Scott Teem’s Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey opened the festival and Steve […]
Escaping Type: An Interview with Aubrey Peeples
July 2, 2014
By Paul Risker. From B-picture phenomenon Sharknado (2013), an abducted daughter in the revenge thriller Rage (2014), a rendezvous with history in A Conversation: Anne Frank Meets God (2014), to the fantasy leanings as the title role in Jem and the Holograms (2016) – the past, present and future has […]
The Good Neighbour (2013)
July 1, 2014
By Sam Littman. Not one element of Astrid Schau-Larsen’s documentary The Good Neighbour is superfluous. For this and many tangential reasons alone it is appreciable; the 58-minute investigative effort principally concerned with relaying information and opinions as concisely as possible is satisfied with its borderline feature-length running time, sustains an acute focus […]
He Who Awakens Dreams: An Interview with Doug Jones
July 1, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the tales of cinematic greats meeting, it ranks as one of the best: in 1997, actor Doug Jones arrived to a night re-shoot of a film called Mimic to do creature effects. On the second day during lunch, the film’s director – the still little-known Guillermo […]
Multicultural Middle-earth: Constructing “Home” and the Post-colonial Imaginary in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings
June 30, 2014
By Laura Crossley. “The nation of course is not a desiring person but a fictive unity imposed on an aggregate of individuals, yet national histories are presented as if they displayed the continuity of the subject-writ-large.” (Shohat and Stam 1994: 101) When writing The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien […]
Cinema that Goes to Eleven: Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s Heavy Metal Movies (2014)
June 27, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Let all metalheads throw up their devilhorns in celebration—Mike “McBeardo” McPadden’s blood-soaked, guitar-churning anthology Heavy Metal Movies: Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, & Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big-Scream Films Ever! is finally here, arriving from the hellish depths of […]