By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “There was a character that hung out in a clock called Froggy, the Magic Gremlin, and they used to say to him, ‘Plunk your Magic Twanger, Froggy!’ There was something about the character that bothered me, and I can recall having some weird dreams because of […]
Beyond the Hills, or The Woman’s Prison
August 16, 2013
By Christopher Sharrett. It amazes me that so few reviewers noted emphatically that Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills (2012), like his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007), is a film about women, about the oppression of women, in an era that constantly rolls back the rights of women […]
Shock Horror: An interview with Alan Jones, co-director of FILM4 FrightFest 2013
August 15, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Alan Jones is something of a legend within the world of fantasy and horror film journalism. In a career spanning over four decades he has reported from the set of the original Star Wars film, and had dinner with Sissy Spacek while she was making Carrie. However, […]
Touching the Wild Things: Haptic visuality in Where the Wild Things Are
August 14, 2013
By Kelly Burt. The film Where the Wild Things Are (2009), based on the 1963 children’s book of the same name by Maurice Sendak, offers an intimate experience of a child’s world. It focuses on the central character, Max, a nine-year-old boy who uses his imagination in an attempt to […]
The Iron Horse (1924)
August 14, 2013
By Hector Arkomanis. The main story–the construction of the railway–is fairly well known by now, but that only makes Ford’s poetry even more noticeable here: the human figure set against sublime landscapes[1]; documentary-like scenes of men laying tracks on the fields and of buffalo cattle being lead across the plane […]
Highlights from the 18th Annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, July 18-21
August 14, 2013
By Michael T. Toole. I’ve been covering the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF from here on out) for several years now and I’m generally asked if I still have the same sense of wonderment as when I first attended the festival eleven years ago. It’s with validated pleasure that […]
City Girl (1930)
August 13, 2013
By Luke Aspell. Taken as lost, City Girl dramatizes its own predicament in reverse. Our Daily Bread, the story of wheat from which this 1930 Fox release was re-cut, would have hymned the cyclical sense of Tustine’s (David Torrence) life of toil. In the light of that perspective, it is […]
Looking at the Landscape of Childhood in Ivan’s Childhood and Germany Year Zero
August 12, 2013
By Devapriya Sanyal. The two great wars of the twentieth century would change everything for humankind once and for all; both materially and spiritually. These wars formed the basis for diverse artistic depictions and found their way into various works both during the war, after the war and in peacetime […]
Old and New: Woody’s Blue Jasmine
August 9, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. You’d think that Woody Allen would have exorcized it already, after all the complicated romances he’s filmed, of equal parts truth and bitterness. After moving from his early works of farce and confirming his range with tragic romantic comedies in the late 1970s, he let flow a […]
H.G. Wells’ Plethora of Things
August 9, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. The early American studios acquired literary properties for prestige productions, regardless of what genre grew as a result. The style of classical horror, which emerged in the early 1930s at Universal Studios, appeared largely by accident. By adapting Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the studio […]