By Christopher Sharrett. I hesitated as I began this essay, chiefly because I came across some interviews with Derek Cianfrance, whose work is the subject of these remarks. What he has to say struck me as banal, or immature, or conservative, particularly in his expression of a yearning for the […]
Rewinding the Story of Home Video: Interview with Filmmaker Josh Johnson on Rewind This!
June 17, 2013
By Matthew Sorrento. In today’s age of ethereal media, where films seep within hard drives and emerge on command, even DVDs and Blu-Ray formats seem like attempts to hold onto the past. The VHS tape contains a spooled tape – thus closer to film reels – along with a hollowness, […]
Man of Steel (2013)
June 15, 2013
By Cleaver Patterson. Superman has been reborn, and from hereon shall be known as the Man of Steel – at least he will if Warner Bros. Pictures’ new CGI heavy extravaganza is to be believed. Forget anything you think you know about Clark Kent and his alien alter-ego, as this […]
Ten Mantras of Man of Steel: or How to Make a Blockbuster
By Matthew Sorrento. The prologue on Krypton, detailing Superman’s birth, will play as the start of an intriguing science fiction adventure – and then shall be exploited in a bizarre sf-horror invasion of Earth. Zack Snyder should take his title too literally and pack his film with imagery of steel […]
Museum Hours (2012): A San Francisco International Film Festival Review
June 12, 2013
By Mark James. Here’s a problem: people are things as well as they are people. Not as much as people are people, clearly, but people’s sensual bodies as well as their social being exist in precisely the same plane of things-in-the-world, as junk at a flea market or artifacts in […]
Chimeras (2013): A San Francisco International Film Festival Review
June 10, 2013
By Mark James. The documentary Chimeras is a contemplative, respectful attempt to look at Chinese modernity through the lens of its art. The film ends with a tripartite definition of the title. A chimera is a mythological beast made of different animal parts; a wild, unrealistic dream or fantasy; and […]
Art and Devotion: Documenting Ricky Jay
By Matthew Sorrento. Just like the cinema, the magic show is rooted in the nature of looking. After all, the illusionist’s art is to trick the eye into seeing something different, or redirecting the eye’s attention. The earliest cinematic prototypes, like the zoetrope and the kineograph, produce optical illusions but […]
Spaces of Resistance: Film Festivals and Anti-Capitalism
By Anthony Killick. Film festivals have always operated as nodes in a network of global power relations. Set within this field of social and economic tensions, they act as spaces in which our view of the world is formed through our interaction with films. The ways in which these spaces […]
Bury The Hatchet (2010)
By Robert Kenneth Dator. Bury The Hatchet? Where is the conflict? The title of this beautifully shot documentary would constitute something of a double entendre if one could find the combatants. There is poetic strife of a sort; factionalism of a sort; mild hostility; competition, but no long-standing feud; no […]
Now You See Me (2013)
June 5, 2013
By Jacob Mertens. Cinema can be seen as an act of illusion. Scenes that filmed separately become a cohesive whole, real footage blends seamlessly with CG, and a story moves at the behest of a surreptitious screenwriter. Naturally, Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me finds an appropriate medium for its […]