By Moira Sullivan. The award at the 70th Venice Film Festival called the “Special Orizzonti Award for Innovative Content” went to Shahram Mokri’s Mahi Va Gorbeh (Fish and Cat). The Orrizzonti (Horizons) category features work that takes cinema into new directions. This is well exemplified by acclaimed Iranian writer-director’s amazing […]
Film4 FrightFest 2013 | Day 5
September 12, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. All good things, as they say, must come to an end. Film4 FrightFest has, since its inception fourteen years ago, built a reputation on showcasing an eclectic mix of stylish horror and bizarre fantasy, and in the process have shown that fans of these genres can have […]
Eastern Boys: A Venice Film Festival Review
September 12, 2013
By Moira Sullivan. Eastern Boys, directed by Robin Campillo, won best film in the 70th Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. The film offers a complex and provocative narrative about a young gang of East European undocumented immigrants who plunder a middle-aged man (Olivier Rabourdin) after he tries to pick up one of […]
The 70th Venice Film Festival
September 11, 2013
By Moira Sullivan. Venice is the oldest film festival in which artistic films that abandon the safe predictability of conventional narratives are often rewarded. This year’s festival featured fifty-two world and two international premieres. The festival has expanded with a need for larger facilities, and has created a “light market” […]
Elvira Notari: A Woman in Search of Desire
September 11, 2013
By Rossella Scalia. My first encounter with the director Elvira Notari occurred randomly, as almost always happens with important meetings. I had never heard of her nor of her many works, although I spent about thirty years of my life in Italy. The fascist censorship has drastically affected the […]
A Teacher
September 10, 2013
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Hannah Fidell’s debut feature A Teacher has been getting something of a critical drubbing in the media since it opened on Friday September 6 in Manhattan; and yet it seems to me that the movie is remarkably successful in a small, quiet way. I also notice […]
Repo Man (1984)
September 10, 2013
By Brandon Konecny. As a child of the nineties, I narrowly evaded much of the cultural sterility of the preceding decade. Sure, we had the unfortunate instances of the “Macarena” and Yugoslav Wars (as well as the profound ineffectiveness of the industrial world to respond appropriately); but after watching Alex […]
Reconsidering The Landscape of the Homoerotic Body in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail
September 10, 2013
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. I begin, as my title suggests, with a quote from Agnès Godard, the cinematographer of Beau Travail (1999): “The most inexhaustible landscapes for me remain faces and bodies” (Vincentelli 2000: 166). The inexhaustible possibilities for cinematically inhabiting the homoeroticized male body are remarkable in Beau Travail, […]
“Rip It Up and Start Again:” Scream 4 and Post-?
September 9, 2013
By Will Dodson. Wes Craven’s Scream 4 is in many ways a fitting capstone to the 9/11 decade, thus the title of this essay, “Rip it up and start again: Scream 4 and Post-?”[1] “Rip it up and start again” is a lyric from the great post-punk band, Orange Juice, […]
Looking with Julia’s Eyes: Gender, Spectatorship, and Contemporary Spanish Horror Cinema
September 6, 2013
By Ian Olney. Over the past decade or so, the Spanish horror film has undergone a striking renaissance. During the final years of the Franco regime, in the 1960s and 1970s, horror cinema flourished in Spain, producing such genre icons as Jess Franco, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, Amando de Ossorio, and […]