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 […]
Blow Out
By Cleaver Patterson. Director Brian De Palma’s classic 1981 conspiracy thriller Blow Out is not just a marvellously realised exercise in rising paranoia, but also a stylishly twisted example of one of Hollywood’s masters of suspense at the height of his powers. John Travolta stars as Jack Terry, a technician […]
The Continuity Girls: Angela Allen and Pam Mann Francis
June 3, 2013
David A. Ellis talks to two legendary script supervisors. Many people when watching a film don’t give a thought to all the hard work involved in bringing the movie to the screen. One job that rarely attracts attention is continuity. Part of the job of the continuity person, or script […]
66th Cannes Film Festival Day 12 – Revisiting the Palme d’Or Winner La Vie d’Adèle
May 31, 2013
By Moira Sullivan. In an unprecedented decision, the jury for the official competition of the 66th Festival de Cannes, led by President Steven Spielberg, awarded the French-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche and French actresses Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos the Palme d’Or for La Vie d’Adèle – Chapitre 1 & 2 (Blue is the […]
Tribeca 2013 Festival Report
May 30, 2013
By Michael Miller. The Tribeca Film Festival has developed a reputation for its documentary program, which it further burnished in 2013. A few notable titles presented at the festival this year were: Big Shot (directed by Kevin Connolly), part of the festival’s ESPN Sports Film Festival, which winningly profiles John […]
66th Cannes Film Festival Day 11 – Michael Kohlhaas, Cinema de la Plage and the 2013 Queer Palm Award
May 29, 2013
By Moira Sullivan. Michael Kohlhaas Arnaud Des Pallière’s Michael Kohlhaas failed to engage spectators because of the slow pace and tough to chew narrative construction. The dramaturgy forced viewers to wait out the step-by-step construction of the film. For relief, most of Kohlhass is shot in the Cévennes mountains and […]