By Paul Risker. The war on terror has received ample coverage on news and media outlets. But in an age when we are questioning or are being encouraged to question our sources of information, we are still forced to tolerate a certain vantage point from which to view world events. Four […]
Sorcerer (1977)
July 9, 2014
By William Repass. “You think they pay you to drive? They pay you to be terrified. That’s your division of labor.” –The Wages of Fear (1953) Let’s not overlook the attendant division, that of leisure. Supposing, for example, you’d rather pay to be terrified. In that case look no further than […]
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Peckinpah the Dramatist
July 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. The label “master of violence” was long ago affixed to director Sam Peckinpah. Books on Peckinpah with titles like “Bloody Sam,” and studies comparing the director’s films to Kubrick’s icy-cold vision in A Clockwork Orange, insist that we separate uses of violence – an element of drama […]
Finding Fault with The Fault In Our Stars
July 7, 2014
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 […]