By Leo Collis. Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth, American Teacher is a documentary that focuses on the lives of four teachers, as they approach different points in their careers. Going beyond their role as educators, the film looks at how the profession has shaped their personal lives, and […]
Twice Round the Daffodils: 50th Anniversary
By Cleaver Patterson. There were three subjects British cinema excelled at during the heady days of 60’s liberalism – kitchen-sink-drama, Gothic horror and old-fashioned, feel-good humour. If director Tony Richardson’s gritty social treatise A Taste of Honey (1961) and anything produced by Hammer during their mid-decade heyday epitomised the first […]
Sexual Chronicles of a French Family (2011)
May 30, 2012
By Gary M. Kramer. Intensely erotic, and featuring beaucoup nudity, Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold’s Sexual Chronicles of a French Family wants to talk about–and show–people having sex. The filmmakers delight in presenting the subject both visually and verbally as the characters discuss sex as much as they are seen […]
Welcome To The Majority (2012)
By Leo Collis. After working in film and television for nearly a decade, Russell Owen steps up to present his debut full-length production, Welcome to the Majority. The film is centred on a post-apocalyptic purgatory, where nine people are forced to face their demons to find a way out. Split […]
The Deep Blue Sea: Terence Davies and the Woman’s Melodrama
By Christopher Sharrett. The woman’s melodrama has fallen on hard times, as is the case with any genre that takes its material seriously in the age of the Hollywood blockbuster. The continuing plight of women under the oppression of patriarchy simply isn’t much of a topic of interest in the […]
Silent House (2011)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. For nearly a decade, the horror genre seems to have been stuck in an immense black hole, from which has seeped a rank plague of remakes – be they of American classics or foreign sensations. On rare occasion, there might be a faint whiff of creativity […]
Indie Game: The Movie (2011): A SXSW Review
By Jacob Mertens. For those of us passionately invested in the burgeoning art form of video games, the parallels between both game and film industries remain undeniable. Games and film have a similar visual/auditory construction, they both rely on intense collaboration, and they exhibit near identical patterns in marketing and […]
The Day He Arrives (2011): 55th San Francisco International Film Festival Review
By Janine Gericke. Korean writer and director Hong Sangsoo’s new film The Day He Arrives follows a former filmmaker and now professor, Seongjun, who seems to be stuck in every sense of the word. It’s a stark film that shows how tedious and repetitive life can sometimes feel. Seongjun arrives in Seoul for a brief […]
Contemporary Neorealist Principles in Abbas Kiarostami’s Filmmaking (1997 – 2005)
By Luke Buckle. ABSTRACT Iranian film has in recent decades comprised an increasingly important and influential cinema. The Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 paved the way for freedom of artistic and literary expression, communicating a new generation of unheard voices in Iranian society. More specifically Iranian cinema has progressed in […]
All is Forgiven, Cohen: Not a review of The Dictator
By Daniel Lindvall. What’s the difference between a comedian who joked about goat-fucking, dirty-bearded Muslims in 1975 and one who does the same in 2012? The first one was racist, the latter only ironic. That’s why we can now laugh ourselves silly at the same amusing stereotype, since we are […]