By Patrick Keating and Lisa Jasinski. During its eight day run in July 2013, the 27th Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival offered a dizzying schedule of screenings, conversations, and special events at five local venues throughout the compact city center of Bologna, Italy. The festival brought together 17 programs, celebrating rarely […]
Elysium (2013)
August 24, 2013
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. I should begin by stating that I do not regularly indulge in assessing the average narrative film with politics near the forefront of my mind. When it comes to film criticism, I prefer to place emphasis on other aspects that, at least for me, play a […]
Becoming Traviata (2013)
August 21, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. A couple years ago, I traveled to England for an internship and decided that so long as I was on that side of the ocean, I would go ahead and see Malta, Italy, and France as well. I remember stepping off the train into Rome and stumbling […]
The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012)
August 20, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Films that sell themselves as horror movies generally fall into one of two camps. They either go for all-out viscerals, leaving little to the viewer’s imagination as they try to outdo what has gone before with evermore graphic and gory visuals, or they rely on subtlety and […]
‘In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema’ by Gabriele Pedullà
August 18, 2013
A book review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. This slight but explosive volume, published in an English translation by Verso in 2012, has been kicking around on my work desk for about a year. I wrote a rather negative review of it for Choice, the library journal, and while I don’t […]
Andy’s Gang, or Saturday Morning of the Living Dead
August 16, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “There was a character that hung out in a clock called Froggy, the Magic Gremlin, and they used to say to him, ‘Plunk your Magic Twanger, Froggy!’ There was something about the character that bothered me, and I can recall having some weird dreams because of […]
Beyond the Hills, or The Woman’s Prison
August 16, 2013
By Christopher Sharrett. It amazes me that so few reviewers noted emphatically that Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012), like his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007), is a film about women, about the oppression of women, in an era that constantly rolls back the rights of women […]
Shock Horror: An interview with Alan Jones, co-director of FILM4 FrightFest 2013
August 15, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Alan Jones is something of a legend within the world of fantasy and horror film journalism. In a career spanning over four decades he has reported from the set of the original Star Wars film, and had dinner with Sissy Spacek while she was making Carrie. However, […]
Touching the Wild Things: Haptic visuality in Where the Wild Things Are
August 14, 2013
By Kelly Burt. The film Where the Wild Things Are (2009), based on the 1963 children’s book of the same name by Maurice Sendak, offers an intimate experience of a child’s world. It focuses on the central character, Max, a nine-year-old boy who uses his imagination in an attempt to […]
The Iron Horse (1924)
August 14, 2013
By Hector Arkomanis. The main story–the construction of the railway–is fairly well known by now, but that only makes Ford’s poetry even more noticeable here: the human figure set against sublime landscapes[1]; documentary-like scenes of men laying tracks on the fields and of buffalo cattle being lead across the plane […]