By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godzilla is a simple creature. A relic from the prehistoric era, brought to life by atomic testing, Godzilla has only one aim in life. He just wants to destroy everything in his path, and he doesn’t care one whit about humanity. He’s an inescapable metaphor for […]
Female Sexual Pleasure Unpunished in Bright Days Ahead
May 14, 2014
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Finally, a film about an older woman who has an affair, and doesn’t get punished by the narrative. How delightful! How unusual! It isn’t as if Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux jours) is a masterpiece, but it does get a few things right and it is […]
Criminally Boring: Wolf Creek 2 (2013)
May 14, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. It has been nearly a decade since Wolf Creek (2005) provided a cautionary tale about backpacking through the outback. Now with Wolf Creek 2, the crazed killer of captives, Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) returns. If this sequel—also based on actual events—is not as strong as the […]
Assault on Wall Street (2013)
May 13, 2014
By Sebastian Clare. To cinephiles and avid video-gamers alike, the name ‘Uwe Boll’ is synonymous with the very worst of what today’s film industry has to offer. Whether for repeatedly adapting successful game franchises such as House of the Dead, BloodRayne and Alone in the Dark into atrocious big-screen flops, […]
Bright Days Ahead – A Tribeca Interview
May 8, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. Like Julien (Laurent Lafitte), the younger computer instructor, who tells Caroline (Fanny Ardant) the older woman he is romantically involved with that he is a diversion, Bright Days Ahead, co-written and directed by Marion Vernoux is a diverting film. Caroline, a retired dentist, takes some classes […]
Writing Freedom: An Interview with Kim Longinotto on Salma
By Paul Risker. We need to celebrate the documentary Salma (2013) as a story of survival. Imprisoned by her family, the famous Tamil poet and activist Salma was forced to marry and denied education. Told largely through the written word, the film depicts her use of poetry writing for […]
Catching Fire: The Revolution Will Be Televised
May 6, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. Revolution used to be a tangible part of our history. Not just stories of Malcolm X riling up a packed church in Harlem or Nelson Mandela looming in a prison cell. There was a sense that revolution was both cyclical and inevitable: a snake in the grass […]
Wake in Fright (1971)
May 5, 2014
By Robert Kenneth Dator. Great Australian films are not so hard to come by. Finding great Australian films that Australians think are great is another matter all together. Australian film, troubled from the late 1940s when exhibitors decided to get out of the production business, spawned a robust share of […]
The Bachelor Weekend – A Tribeca Interview
May 2, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. The Bachelor Weekend is a genial Irish comedy about a groom named Fionnan (Hugh O’Conor), his best man Davin (Andrew Scott), and the quartet of other men taking to the great outdoors for a Stag party. The guests include Fionnan’s gay brother Kevin (Michael Legge) and […]
OffOn: An Explosion of the Senses
May 2, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly – first white, then red […]