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 […]
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 […]