By Matthew Sorrento. By reissuing David Fincher’s The Game (1997), the Criterion Collection commits an act of outright auteurism. This film sits on the lower Fincher shelf, somewhere near Alien3 and Panic Room. The filmmaker’s come a long way – he now seems unflappable after his reflections on life/mortality in […]
Looper (2012)
By Jacob Mertens. Imagine the breadth of daily life changed by a single important innovation: the ability to travel through time. In order to breathe life into this story, a writer must allow the detail of time travel to slowly distort the world around it as if dropping a pebble […]
Corman’s Poe and Male Hysteria in 60s Horror: A Revaluation
By Christopher Sharrett. This is an attempt at a brief revaluation of Roger Corman’s cycle of adaptations of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, which strike me as among the most significant contributions to the psychological turn of the horror film, equaling in intelligence and ambition, if not realized achievement, […]
Laurence Anyways
By Anna Arnman. Laurence Anyways is the 23-year-old Canadian Xavier Dolans third film as director and writer. His acclaimed previous films J´ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother, 2009) and Les amours imaginaires (Heartbeats, 2010) were partly autobiographical and Dolan also acted in them, but this time he follows […]
Compliance (2012): A San Francisco International Film Festival Review
By Janine Gericke. There are some movies that I refuse to watch. There are some things that I don’t need burned into my brain. Usually, that Black List consists of painful and uncomfortable things like Eli Roth’s torture porn oeuvre. Surprisingly, Compliance is far from torture porn. It doesn’t have gore. But it […]
In Production: Our first ever DOUBLE ISSUE
September 28, 2012
Shooting in Riyadh when Arabia Was Poor: American film crew accepts Arabian hospitality and lunch with Saudi King I’d flown into Riyadh from Bahrain as one of a film crew; about twenty of us travelling the world in a Pan American Airways DC-4 airliner shooting scenes for the huge screen […]
Safar’s Friday Forum
September 24, 2012
Malu Halasa reports from “Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema,” the most ambitious programme of popular Arab film ever seen in the UK, organized by The Arab British Centre, in partnership with The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Dubai International Film Festival, 21-27 September 2012. “We are not […]
Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time
By Francis DiClemente. Last summer, in the midst of the blockbuster movie season dominated by sequels, 3-D animation and superhero offerings, I stumbled upon a cinematic treat from a forgotten era. While eating my lunch at my desk one afternoon, I went to YouTube to look up some alternative music […]
Dead End Detroit: An American Story
By Daniel Lindvall. The music documentary Searching for Sugar Man had its world premiere earlier this year at Sundance. A fitting place since this is, according to its Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, “an American story.” It is also a Detroit story, a story about the music industry, but most of […]
The End of the 80s? Brief notes on Cosmopolis and the film history of the yuppie
By Daniel Lindvall. Could it be that the yuppie is finally dying? And does that mean that the eighties are over? Is it a burial ode that David Cronenberg has given us with his latest film, Cosmopolis? Bred by the neoliberal stage of finance capitalism, the yuppie personality was made […]