By Tom Ue. Alan Brown’s first film, O Beautiful, won the Future Filmmaker Award at the 2002 Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, and was an official selection of the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. His debut feature, Book of Love, which stars Simon Baker, Frances O’Connor, Greg Smith, and Bryce […]
Richard C. Sarafian (1930-2013)
September 29, 2013
By Michael T. Toole. Richard C. Sarafian, the versatile Armenian-American director/actor whose most celebrated film, the exhilaratingly existential chase drama, Vanishing Point, is still one of the most actively discussed road films today, died on September 18, 2013 of pneumonia in Los Angeles. He was 83. Richard Caspar Sarafian was […]
Prisoners: At the End of a Slippery Slope
September 28, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. Moral relativism can make for a lousy film. Characters bark and growl about their actions being justified, the narrative halts to brood, the nature of God and sin are clumsily introduced, all for an elusive truth that might as well be out of the filmmakers’ reach. To […]
Charles Burnett’s Inner City Portrait: Revisiting Killer of Sheep and the post-Watts crisis on film
September 27, 2013
By Jamie Isbell. Charles Burnett’s UCLA thesis feature Killer of Sheep (1977) has become something of a retrospective masterpiece. A cult artifact speaking to one generation from another, and holding ground as one of the most clarified examples of mid-century European film flavours drifting into the cinematic record of black […]
Selected Film Essays and Interviews (Bruce F. Kawin, 2013)
September 26, 2013
Book Review by Jez Owen. This collection from academic imprint Anthem Press collates material written by the eminent University of Boulder resident lecturer, critic and theorist Bruce F. Kawin. Written between 1977 and 2001, the work included covers a cross-section of film specific topics; from those defining a film’s particular […]
Stoker (2013)
September 24, 2013
By William Repass. “Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for who we come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free. And to become adult…is to become free.” A girl with hair like spilled ink sits alone at her desk, […]
The Grays of the IMAX Oz
September 20, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. While viewing the new 3D IMAX version of The Wizard of Oz, I didn’t notice anything different in the film’s central color portion. The hues are warm, just like the experience of viewing among first timers who are lucky enough to see it on the big screen. […]
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
September 20, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Watching the work of German animator Lotte Reiniger, one thing is clear above all else: the magical shadow plays, which were her favorite medium, are perfectly suited to a world of fantasy and make-believe, as seen in her masterpiece The Adventures of Prince Achmed, newly released by […]
The Kid with a Bike (2011)
September 19, 2013
By Luke Buckle. The Dardenne brothers return with another realist-documentary style film, this time depicting eleven year old protagonist Cyril (Thomas Doret) and the disruption to his life after his father (Jérémie Renier) abandoned him, leaving him at a foster home in Seraing. Winning the Grand Prix at the 2011 […]
The Ballad of Narayama (1958)
September 17, 2013
By John A. Riley. Keisuke Kinoshita’s colorful elegy The Ballad of Narayama deals with ubasute, the apparently apocryphal Japanese practice of abandoning elderly relatives to the elements, and about which many legends exist. In a village in the Shinano mountains, where food is scarce, we are introduced to Orin, an […]