By Daniel Lindvall. The year is 1918 and we are somewhere on the Japanese countryside. Jiro is a young boy obsessed with airplanes. One night he dreams about flying a bird-like plane over the idyllic fields surrounding his village. Smiling peasants wave up at him. But suddenly, out of dark […]
The Lying Camera of De Palma’s Snake Eyes
April 14, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. As with much of his work, especially in the last 15 years or so, one’s response to Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes (1999) was to a large degree established even before the film’s release. Coming off the commercial success of Mission: Impossible two years prior, this 1998 feature […]
Cinema Journeyman: An Interview with Mark Cousins
By Paul Risker. In 2011 Mark Cousins became film journalism’s Odysseus when he concluded his six-year journey to tell the story of film across sixteen hours. The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) stands as a seminal documentary on the subject of cinema. One might have thought the logical progression […]
Oculus: Another Look In the Haunted Mirror
April 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Oculus is a rather pretentious title for a rather straightforward movie, but despite the assembly line nature of its’ construction, the film still has something going for it. At first it’s hard to say precisely what the film has to offer, because on the surface it […]
Rare Chance for New Yorkers to See the Films of Wheeler Winston Dixon
April 10, 2014
On Sunday 4 May 2014 at 7PM, filmmaker, film studies professor and regular Film International contributor, Wheeler Winston Dixon will be screening some of his earliest films at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery. The screening, which will include films made between 1969 and 1976, is the first chance to see Dixon’s films […]
The Raid 2 – A SXSW Review
April 9, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. The Raid 2 opens with a wide shot of a man kneeling beside a freshly dug grave. Facing his inevitable death, the film captures him as a small creature unable to influence the pendulum swing of fate. When the camera moves in, viewers see that this poor […]
Out of the Furnace: The Question of Adversarial Cinema
April 8, 2014
By Christopher Sharrett. I did not see Scott Cooper’s Out of the Furnace during its initial run some months ago, in part because I thought little of Cooper’s Crazy Heart (2009), and anticipated, incorrectly, that the film would adapt Thomas Bell’s important (although not very distinctive) novel Out of This […]
Tomorrow’s Machine: An Interview with Filmmaker Caradog James
April 8, 2014
By Paul Risker. Caradog James’ sophomore feature, the science-fiction drama The Machine (2013), shares its genre sibling’s habitual tendency to hypothesise and present visions of the future. In keeping with its parental heritage, The Machine offers a bleak vision that merges the future of tomorrow with yesterday’s past. It takes the present-day […]
The Superficial Ugliness of The Great Beauty
April 6, 2014
By Daniel Lindvall. “Do you know why I eat only roots? Because roots are important,” explains a 104-year-old nun to the greying author and playboy Jep Gambardella, main character of Paolo Sorrentino’s recent Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Forty years ago Gambardella wrote the roman à clef of his generation. […]
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, or, Nothing You Believe is True
April 5, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I’m teaching a class right now in comic book movies, partly to trace the history of the genre from the 1940s on – when they began as Saturday morning serials – and partly to discover, if I could, why these films have moved to the mainstream […]