By Jacob Mertens. Five friends camp out in a cabin, helping one of their own detox from drugs, only to find foul murder indelicately staged in the basement. Skinned cats hang from the ceiling, blood trails across the floor, and a pile of cinder speaks to some terrible crime committed. […]
Wadjda: Saudi Arabia, Cinema and Women’s Rights
By Daniel Lindvall. Wadjda (2012) is said to be the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. It is also written and directed by the nation’s first female film-maker, Haifaa Al Mansour. It is currently making its way through Europe, opening (or having already opened) early this year in […]
North Korean Red Dawn: Olympus Has Fallen
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Part Kim Jong-un’s “the West must fall” fantasy come to life, part right wing wet dream and all around militarist anthem, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen (2013) is an updated riff on John Frankenheimer’s Manchurian Candidate (1962; though we’ve already had that in 2004, directed by […]
Passion (2012)
By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. For his first film since 2007’s Redacted, Brian De Palma returns to his Hitchcockian obsession, this time by way of Alain Corneau. A loose remake of Corneau’s final film, Love Crime (Crime d’amour, 2010), Passion feels very much like a De Palma flick from the ‘80s, with […]
Jack the Giant Slayer
By Cleaver Patterson. In film fantasy farmhouses have always been a popular mode of transportation between our world and that of make-believe. Dorothy used her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s humble home in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to reach a land beyond her wildest dreams, and now the ramshackle […]
Bristol Radical Film Festival 2013: 25th Feb-4th March
By Anthony Killick. The success of the 2012 Bristol Radical Film Festival proved how the demand for socially and politically engaged film hasn’t dwindled, despite attempts by those in power to abstract politics away from the day-to-day lives of the public. The festival showed how film is one of the […]
Lab Coats in Hollywood
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Scientists and mathematicians will never understand artists, and vice versa. This was brought home to me forcefully by David A. Kirby’s book, Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), which traces the checkered history of math and science experts in […]
Death of the Moguls: An Interview with Wheeler Winston Dixon
By Daniel Lindvall. With his new book, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood, Wheeler Winston Dixon has performed no mean feat in finding a fresh and illuminating perspective on what is probably the most written about phenomenon in film history, the Hollywood studio system. By placing the […]
Gay Friendly (as long as you’re not Palestinian): The Invisible Men
By Morvary Samaré. The Invisible Men, an Israeli film by director Yariv Mozer, was one of the documentaries that screened at this year’s One World Human Rights Film Festival in Prague, Czech Republic. The film portrays the stories of three gay Palestinians and their struggle to create a tolerable life […]
Re-Birth of a Nation or Why Django Has More to Say about Contemporary America than the Other “Historically Accurate” Films
By Celluloid Liberation Front “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” (D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation) “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves… A war of this kind must be conducted on […]