By Matthew Sorrento. Bizarre, shocking, yet filled with truth, Joshua Oppenheimer‘s The Act of Killing continues to gather acclaim. This Oscar-nominated record of routine killings of Communists in Indonesia during 1965-66 haunts viewers. As a filmed document about memory – the paramilitary gangsters (“free men”) discuss on camera how they […]
Autumn Sonata (1978)
February 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. “A mother and a daughter. What a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction.” So says Eva (Liv Ullmann) toward the end of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). More than any other line of dialogue, in what is a remarkably written film, this gets to the […]
Shackled (Belenggu): A Well-Mounted Disappointment
February 11, 2014
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. I wish I could say kinder things about this film, especially since it’s clear that this was a labor of love on the part of its director, Upi Avianto, an Indonesian genre filmmaker with numerous other films to her credit, such as Looking For Love in […]
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
February 7, 2014
By William Repass. Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street begins with a simple equation: money is a drug. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible,” enthuses Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), as he leans in to snort a line of coke in extreme close-up, “you’ll be able to conquer the […]
Hollywood Exiles in Europe
February 3, 2014
A Book Review by Wheeler Winston Dixon. Let’s just start by saying that this is an excellent book. I get stacks of new titles every day from publishers, and it takes a lot for a book to really jump out of the pile and interest me, particularly on a topic […]
American Hustle (2013)
January 31, 2014
By Jacob Mertens. David O. Russell’s American Hustle begins with a title card stating “Some of this actually happened,” and for once a Hollywood film makes an honest claim to real events. Upon closer examination though, Russell had little choice but to say so. His film features well-developed characters, but […]
From Gangster to Master: the Forgotten Edward G. Robinson
January 29, 2014
By Matthew Sorrento. I. The Look Robinson’s legion of fans grew after the actor delivered an intense desperation as Rico Bandello in Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931). A hood who embraces a Macbethian drive to kill and consume, Rico soon witnesses the betrayal of his sideman, then ponders his own […]
The Cinematic Palette from Feudal Japan – Gate of Hell
January 28, 2014
By Giuseppe Sedia. Beyond any artistic value or aesthetic significance, the critical response to Gate of Hell (1953) provides a rare glimpse into the evolution of cinematic taste in the Fifties. According to Jean Cocteau, who served as jury president at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, Kinugasa’s visually flamboyant jidai-geki displayed […]
Rocky Balboa and the Politics of Urban Renewal
January 22, 2014
By Jon Kraszewski. Coming at the end of a film series that had degenerated into useless portraits of cartoonish characters and simplified visions of social issues, the 2006 film Rocky Balboa probably attracted very little attention from progressive film critics. I, admittedly, decided to watch it to indulge my fondness […]
The Conformists: Creativity and Decadence in the Bulgarian Cinema 1945-89 (2011)
January 21, 2014
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. A full historical account of Bulgaria’s cinema under Communism—given the topic’s obscurity and the lack of translated resources in the West, such a venture seems to smack of futility. To even have hopes of pulling off a project of this sort, one would have […]