By Joseph Wright. Terry Zwigoff’s critically acclaimed documentary, Crumb, explores the life and career of controversial underground artist, Robert Crumb, as well as his reclusive and troubled family members. Beginning with Crumb’s career, the film thrusts the viewer into the artist’s success by displaying footage from an art show dedicated […]
Noir City 10
February 25, 2012
Michael T. Toole delivers a list of highlights from the tenth Noir City festival, San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, January 20-29, 2012. For ten straight days, Noir City entertained and informed us to just how fun, disturbing and enthralling the noir genre can be, and boy was it! Stylish and sexy, […]
Boogie (2008)
February 22, 2012
By Gary M. Kramer. Radu Muntean’s Boogie (aka Summer Holiday) made in 2008, is a slight, but compelling drama about the title character, Bogdan (Dragos Bucur), once nicknamed “Boogie.” The film opens with Bogdan playing with his son Adi (Vlad Muntean, the director’s own child) on the sparsely populated beach. […]
Liberal Arts (2012)
By Janine Gericke. Most people probably know Josh Radnor from his CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but thanks to word of mouth and Netflix instant streaming, more people are getting to know Josh Radnor, feature film writer, director and actor through his first film Happythankyoumoreplease (2010). Happythankyoumoreplease was a solid debut filled with […]
The Story of Film: An interview with Mark Cousins
February 20, 2012
By Gary M. Kramer. Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odysseyis a fascinating—and fantastic—documentary that traces more than 100 years of cinema in 900 minutes. Featuring clips from 1,000 films, Cousins hopscotches from cinema’s early start in New Jersey and France and visits Asia, Africa, and South America while […]
The Grey (2012)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. You are one of the few who survive a terrible accident that leaves you stranded in the midst of a vast tundra wilderness. You might be a few miles from civilization; you might be hundreds. Warmth is scarce; food even scarcer. To make your situation more […]
My Week with Marilyn (2011)
By Salomon Rogberg. The other day I read in one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers Dagens Nyheter, that biopics were on the rise. Maybe the critic was right. Both Margaret Thatcher, who was the British prime minister between the years 1979 to 1990, and J Edgar Hoover, the first director of […]
The Legend of Kaspar Hauser
By Celluloid Liberation Front. “It’s such a struggle to self-produce your own film” sighs Davide Manuli. “You’ve got no idea, cinema is a rigid and harsh structure that does not allow any intrusion among its ranks,” he continues. Far from being dispirited, the director of La Leggenda di Kaspar Hauser […]
The Music Man in Retrospect
By Christopher Sharrett. My recent viewing of Meredith Willson/Morton da Costa’s film The Music Man, for the first time in decades, forced me to reflect on my initial viewing (in 1962, the year of its release) with my parental family while I endured another insufferable summer vacation in Bennington, Vermont, […]
Call for reviews and reviewers
January 31, 2012
The journal Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia (ACME) welcomes film reviews. Should you like to review a particular documentary or send us one to review, please email the film review editor, Dr Michael Abecassis, directly: michael.abecassis AT modern-langs.ox.ac.uk ACME is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted to […]