By David Sterritt. Hans Detlef Sierck left Germany in 1937, arrived in the United States four years later, Americanized his name to Douglas Sirk, and directed his first Hollywood picture, Hitler’s Madman, in 1943, when the madman Adolf Hitler was still at large and ravaging the world. During the next […]
The Trouble With Hitchcock
June 7, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Mark Rutland: “What do you believe in?” Marnie Edgar: “Nothing.” (From Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie) Alfred Hitchcock is routinely regarded as one of the most profound and technically adept directors in the history of cinema, but I would argue that only the latter half of that statement […]
Homegrown Rebel: An Interview with Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond on The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
June 6, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. Beginning as a rather conventional documentary – at times so familiar we fear it will play like formulaic television – The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne soon finds a matter-of-fact style that nicely reflects its subject. A career jewelry thief, Doris Payne (born 1930) has used […]
Where the Tale Takes Us: An Interview with William Eubank on The Signal
June 5, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. The Signal is a mind-bending (and genre-bending) film that lures its characters and its audience into a fantastic — as in strange and, perhaps, wonderful — world. Nick (Brenton Thwaites) is a partially paralyzed young man who is driving his girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) across country […]
Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse
Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse: A new book by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. The culture of twenty-first century America largely revolves around narcissistic death, violence, and visions of doom. As people are bombarded with amoral metanarratives that display an almost complete lack of empathy for others on television, […]
Throne of Blood: An Ethereal Play of Light and Shadow
June 3, 2014
By William Repass. Wind and mist over hills that turn out to be ruins. A funereal sutra chanted over the soundtrack. Beside a cluster of graves, the rough-hewn marker reads: “Here Stood Spider Web Castle.” These opening shots yield enough story material to piece together not only the outcome of everything […]
Bottled Up: The Treacherous Terrain of Poverty, Family, and Love
June 1, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Indie directors love to mix genres in order to introduce us to fairly realistic characters, unusual stories and fresh narrative strategies. Enid Zentelis effectively mixes elements of serious drama, romantic comedy, and discomforting black comedic elements of the horror film in her low-budget gem, Bottled Up […]
The Trouble with the Kochs: An Interview with Filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin
By Michael T. Toole. Surging from their success with the Oscar-nominated The Trouble with Water (2008) – a personal, harrowing look at a couple surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin have moved on to equally compelling subject matter in Citizen Koch: Charles G. Koch, […]
Double Eisenbergs Spell Trouble
By Matthew Sorrento. Of all the entries in NPR’s 2013 series “Movies I’ve Seen a Million Times,” Jesse Eisenberg’s is the most bizarre. When asked about a movie he could watch over and over again, this actor casually noted that he “never watches movies. I haven’t seen a movie in, […]
The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival
May 28, 2014
By Mark James. The San Francisco International Film Festival, which ran April 24 through May 8th of this year, is true to its name in that its greatest strength has always been its international slate of movies. This year, the Festival’s 57th (remember it is the longest running Festival in […]