Orgasm Inc.

By Amy R Handler. The war between pharmaceutical companies and the personal injury lawyers fighting them can be seen on virtually every American and New Zealand television channel, no matter what time the day or night. No wonder so many people are depressed. How could they not be when they […]

CinemAfrica 3: The Last Laugh in N’Djamena

By Daniel Lindvall. A Screaming Man, written and directed by Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, was selected as best feature film at CinemaAfrica, Stockholm’s annual African film festival, in 2011, after having won the Jury Prize in Cannes the previous year. Adam is pool attendant at a luxury hotel in N’Djamena, capital […]

Tyrannosaur (2011)

By Jacob Mertens. The title of Paddy Considine’s film Tyrannosaur can’t help but call to mind a vicious rampage of death and destruction. As the audience witnesses the opening moments, they immediately associate the prehistoric creature’s savagery with Peter Mullan’s Joseph, who rages outside of a bar and inadvertently kicks […]

Born in Suez: Khaled El Hagar

At the inaugural launch of the UK’s recurring Arabic Film Festival, Omar Kholeif, the festival’s director caught up with the Egyptian film director, Khaled El Hagar, after a retrospective screening of El Hagar’s first feature film, Little Dreams (Ahlam Saghira, 1993). Here is some of what Khaled had to say: […]

Melancholia (2011)

By Bryan Nixon. The notorious Dogme 95 elitist Lars von Trier hanged Bjork (Dancer in the Dark, 2000), forced Jorgen Leth to remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human in the red light district of Bombay (The Five Obstructions, 2003), and showcased the genital mutilation of Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg […]

30th Vancouver International Film Festival

By James Udden. If the Vancouver International Film Festival is any guide, then the state of world film culture remains healthy – at least for now. Every film festival strives for an identity of sorts, but not all succeed. Vancouver manages to successfully nourish multiple identities over its two plus […]

55th BFI London Film Festival 12-27 October, 2011

By Deborah Allison. One of the strengths of the BFI London Film Festival has always been its accessibility. Although press and industry passes are available, it is designed mainly to cater to the film-going public. This ideology is reflected in its varied but unpretentious programming, which features strands calculated to […]

Eugène Green

By Ken Chen. Susan Sontag once called transparency – the luminousness of the thing in itself – the highest value in contemporary film. By this, she meant the way Renoir and Ozu remind us of life. What then should we make of the occluded films of Eugène Green, which invoke […]

‘Where there are Mines Lives the Devil’ – Altiplano

By Amy R Handler. Award winning filmmakers Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth have woven magic like none other in their most recent feature, Altiplano(2009). But viewers beware… This highly potent masterpiece is not for children, or the faint of heart. Perhaps the sorcery lies in Altiplano’s form, which simultaneously […]

Bride Flight: A Psychological Joyride

By Amy R Handler. Bride Flight (2008) is a haunting masterpiece that combines the strength of Dr. Zhivago with the ambiguity of The End of the Affair. The result is a psychological joyride of epic proportions. Based upon the bestselling, novel of the same name, Bride Flight focuses upon three […]