A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Todd McGowan may well be the finest film theorist currently working in the States. His work is consistently original, and he writes with a concision and lucidity that renders even the most daunting of thinkers accessible. His The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (2008) […]
“A Lioness on the Prowl”: Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin
April 22, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Under The Skin (2013) is being sold on the basis of a simple premise, which is true on the face of it, but also offers just the merest suggestion of what the film is in its totality. Scarlett Johansson plays an alien inhabiting a woman’s body, […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Isabel Coixet
April 17, 2014
By Anna Weinstein. Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet has directed ten features and three documentaries in the past twenty-five years. Perhaps best known for her award-winning films My Life Without Me (2003) and The Secret Life of Words (2005) starring Sarah Polley, Coixet also directed Elegy (2008) with Ben Kingsley, Penélope […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Susanne Bier
April 17, 2014
By Anna Weinstein. Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier has directed fifteen films since 1991. Her film Brothers (2004) inspired the 2009 U.S. remake starring Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire, and her film After the Wedding (2006) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. Things We Lost […]
Africa at Sundance 2014: The Quest for Global Humanity
April 17, 2014
By Boukary Sawadogo. Sundance Film Festival is to independent cinema what Hollywood is to mainstream commercial cinema around the world. The best of independent filmmakers’ works compete for awards but also for visibility that could translate into distribution contracts. It is a festival that screens non-U.S. films in different competing […]
An Interview with Sharon Badal – Short Film Curator for the Tribeca Film Festival
April 15, 2014
By Gary M. Kramer. Sharon Badal is the shorts film curator for the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, she received a record-breaking 3,074 submissions. “We broke 3,000 for the first time!” she announced buoyantly in a recent Skype session. The Festival is showcasing 57 shorts from 16 countries in 9 […]
Rising On a Bad Wind: Hayao Miyazaki’s Sad Farewell
April 15, 2014
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 […]