By Amy R Handler. Max Winkler’s debut feature, Ceremony(2010), puts a new spin on the old coming-of-age tale with edgy sensitivity, cryptic characters and a script replete with subtle ambiguity. The plot is familiar. 23-year-old Sam (Michael Angarano) is a budding author of children’s books, but much like with Sam […]
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: A Fairy Tale Remake
By Anna Arnman. Against her will, a young girl, Sally (Bailee Madison), moves in with her estranged father Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) in an enormous old house called Blackwood Mansion. Alex is an architect restoring the house with the help of Kim, an interior […]
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
November 19, 2011
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 […]