By Cleaver Patterson. As the dark nights draw in and Christmas approaches, what better than to settle down and enjoy a good, old fashioned ghost story. It seems appropriate then that, as part of their Gothic season, the BFI has chosen to screen a classic chiller whose initial release was […]
Inside Llewyn Davis: An Austin Film Festival Review
November 5, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. The folk singer sits at the fore of a small crowd in the Gaslight Cafe. The lights hang dim around him, pale concrete at his feet—more a somber tomb than a stage. He sings a strained ballad, voice raw and clear and imperfect but beautiful still. He […]
The Cognitive Bias Towards Pattern Seeking and the Festival Experience: The Ninth Annual Zurich Film Festival
November 2, 2013
By Davide Caputo. After a five-year absence, this year I returned to the Zurich Film Festival to find that the predictions I made regarding its potential in my previous review for FilmInt (6.1, 2008) had been exceeded. The festival now takes over far more of the city, expanding well beyond […]
The Archaeology of Abjection in The Exorcist
October 31, 2013
By Will Dodson. Warner Home Video released a new Blu-ray set of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist on October 8, coinciding with the film’s 40th anniversary. The occasion warrants, I think, a brief revisiting. The set repackages an earlier Blu-ray edition with some new, inconsequential documentary features. Like the earlier release, […]
Captain Phillips (2013)
October 29, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. A few months ago I was listening to NPR’s This American Life podcast, and I caught an episode that was devoted entirely to a hostage situation in Egypt’s Sinai desert. The story involved journalist Meron Estefanos stumbling onto a den of hostages all seeking rescue, unable to […]
Light From the Screen: Cinema, Painting and Spectatorship
October 29, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Noël Coward once observed that “television is for appearing on – not for looking at,” but as the twenty-first century takes firm hold of our collective consciousness, it seems that everyone has become, in one form or another, a spectator of the events of everyday existence, […]
The Counselor
October 28, 2013
By Christopher Sharrett. This overly promoted film had little to recommend it to me, certainly not the presence of Ridley Scott, whose last compelling film was Blade Runner (1982), made over a generation ago. I was interested in the screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, a novelist whose work I view with […]
Oswald Morris: Legendary Cinematographer
October 28, 2013
David A. Ellis talked to the 97-year-old about his work on Moulin Rouge (1952), directed by John Huston, who often referred to Morris as “Kid.” David A. Ellis: How did you get the smoky atmospheric look in the picture? Oswald Morris: We used vaporised oil. I was piling this into […]
Theodor Adorno and Film Theory: The Fingerprint of Spirit (2013)
October 25, 2013
Book Review by Brandon Konecny. Theodor W. Adorno, one of the most recognized members of the Frankfurt School, is a figure seldom mentioned in film studies—and his scarcity is, admittedly, understandable. For anyone who’s read “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment of Mass Deception,” Adorno firmly establishes himself as a scathing critic of […]
Miguel Gomes’ Tabu & F. W. Murnau’s Tabu
October 22, 2013
By Perle Petit. Miguel Gomes’ third feature film takes its name from F. W. Murnau’s 1931 Polynesian epic Tabu, a Story of the South Seas (1931). Released in 2012, Gomes’ sumptuously filmed black and white drama takes reference from the silent film genre to create a unique variation on Murnau’s classic, […]