By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale 2013 is, as always, a feast of well designed program and an audience-friendly film festival, with events, talks, DJ-set and parties welcome to all audiences. There are well-acclaimed festival feature films such as Closed Curtain (Pardé, Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi), Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Nugu-ui Ttal-do […]
Colossal Youth (2006)
November 22, 2013
By Oana Chivoiu. Pedro Costa’s landmark is an aesthetic of austerity that resonates with the thematic content in his features dealing with poverty, slum life, and radical limitations. Colossal Youth is a film about loss, a theme that structures the disjointed narrative fluency of the film and anchors its visual […]
Peter MacDonald: The Man Who Failed to Change Rambo
November 20, 2013
By David A. Ellis. Peter MacDonald was born in London in 1939 and first worked with film for the advertising company Pearl and Dean as a clapper loader. After six months he became a clapper loader for TV, working on a number of productions including Robin Hood, a series […]
Interview with Agnès Varda, AFI Festival
November 20, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. Agnès Varda was the guest artistic director at the AFI Festival this year. She screened two of her films—Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962) and Documenteur (1981)—as well as programmed four other titles: Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959); A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes, 1974); The Marriage of […]
Interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, AFI Festival
November 20, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. Bernardo Bertolucci presented a 3-D version of his Oscar-winning film, The Last Emperor (1987), at the 2013 AFI Fest in Los Angeles. At a roundtable at the festival, in which Film International‘s Gary Kramer participated, the director spoke about the film as well as issues of censorship. What […]
Bristol Radical Film Festival 2014
November 20, 2013
From the 3rd to the 9th of March 2014 the Bristol Radical Film Festival returns with another packed programme of overtly political documentary and fiction film from around the world. From historical classics to contemporary video-activism, short films and feature productions, we show the films that the multiplexes won’t, in […]
Whitewash: An Austin Film Festival Review
November 19, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. Left buried in the formidable winter of Northern Quebec, Bruce (Thomas Haden Church) dwells in the cramped cabin of a snow plow. He drinks melted ice and eats tree bark, waits for the gas to ebb and the plow’s heat to die, then strikes out to forage […]
The Noir Vision of Max Ophüls, Romantic Fatalist
November 14, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Max Ophüls, born Maximillian Oppenheimer on 6 May 1902, Saarbrücken, Germany, was a director known primarily for his romance films, often with sweeping tracking shots, and often taking place in the past. Ophüls’ luxurious camera style is evident in such superb romance films as Letter from […]
Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013)
November 13, 2013
A Book Review by Brandon Konecny. In recent years, theology has taken a growing interest in cinema, viewing it as both an effective exegetic tool and an intriguing cultural form worthy of the field’s attention, and this has brought with it the appearance of a number of stimulating works. However, […]
Big Sur: An Austin Film Festival Review
November 11, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. How tempting it would be to open this review with some Kerouac quote, a burst of frayed genius from his late stage novel Big Sur to set the tone. No doubt, it would give a better idea of what Michael Polish’s film adaptation sets out to accomplish, […]