By Cleaver Patterson. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 9, describes succinctly the new Tom Cruise blockbuster. Oblivion (2013), the sci-fi extravaganza written, directed and produced by Joseph Kosinski and based […]
Spying the Noir: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear
By Matthew Sorrento. By 1959, when making cinema history via Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock was weary of male victims on the run. In North by Northwest, he delivered what screenwriter Ernest Lehman described as “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Essentially, it was the last great work by the […]
The Man Who Should be Legend (Onscreen): Brian Helgeland’s 42
By Matthew Sorrento. I can understand the resistance to film the story of Jackie Robinson since the man himself played the role in 1950. Robinson is a legend so grand that actors would struggle to approach the man behind the story. Onscreen, should Jackie be destined for greatness? Or just […]
Family Friendly Torture Porn
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality.” (Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979]) Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and […]
I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013)
By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. In the opening scene of Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited, two ground crew members, played by Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, get distracted while prepping a plane for take-off, triggering the events of the movie before disappearing, not to be seen again. The scene is reminiscent of […]
IFFR 2013: The Passion of the Everyman in Boy Eating the Bird’s Food (2012)
By Martin Kudláč. The descendants of Plato and Aristotle have done it again. Despite the mass of negative press focussed on the country’s ongoing financial crisis, Greek filmmakers have succeeded in attracting a good deal of attention. This rising modern generation of auteurs has proven to have all the necessary […]
New Narratives for the 21st Century
By Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. With the exhaustion of film narrative an accomplished fact, it would seem that new, “anti-narratives” might be an early clue to a new direction. Inspired by the famous comment by Jean-Luc Godard that a film should “have a beginning, a middle and […]
Unmade in China (2012)
By Robert Kenneth Dator. ‘#1 Film Documentation!’ Anyone in the business has been here before. “Here” is The Twilight Zone of the runaway production. This is the one where any number of joint producers call the shots without talking to each other and never such incidental types as director and […]
Xmas Without China (2013): A SXSW Review
By Jacob Mertens. Could you survive a Christmas holiday season without any products made in China? As far as opening conceits go, Xmas Without China offers its audience a compelling quandary. Following this premise, one might imagine a film that lives up to the honored tradition of documentary satire, in […]
Short Term 12 (2013): A SXSW Review
By Jacob Mertens. A half-naked child streaks across the lawn chased by several twenty-something supervisors. They catch hold of him before he crosses property lines, holding his arms and legs down, letting him calm until he can return to his room under his own power. Shortly thereafter he does, and […]