By Matthew Sorrento. Knife in the Water was a rare kind of debut. The 1962 Polish film brought Roman Polanski international acclaim, earning him an Academy Award nomination and a spot on the cover of Time magazine, where the release represented a new wave of foreign cinema. The accolades were […]
Just Doing It: an interview with Emily James
By Deirdre O’Neill. Emily James is an independent documentary filmmaker and producer who has worked in both television and film and whose work deals with contemporary political issues. Her latest film Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws (released in the UK in July 2011) is both an intervention […]
Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)
By Steven Harrison Gibbs. In October of 2009, Lionsgate’s protracted Saw franchise was nearing its end. With the sixth installment marking the lowest point of its steadily diminishing returns, it was all too apparent that horror fans were growing weary of Jigsaw and his elaborate, grotesquely violent traps. Meanwhile, Paramount […]
Drive, or the Hero in Eclipse
By Christopher Sharrett. It seems to me that Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) is an important film (it is too soon to say if it is anything like a great one), at the very least for its sense of the fading, threatened male hero as a representation of […]
She Monkeys (2011)
By Salomon Rogberg. Swedish film director Lisa Aschan has said that a western is about sex, power and animals, but also what it means to be a man. In She Monkeys (2011) men are replaced with women, there’s no explicit and bloody violence or any sex, but the story is driven […]
CFP: Music and the Moving Image VII
October 14, 2011
Music and the Moving Image VII Conference at NYU Steinhardt, June 1-3, 2012 CALL FOR PAPERS The annual conference, Music and the Moving Image, encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between music, sound, and the entire universe of moving images (film, television, video games, iPod, computer, […]
Melancholia (2011)
By Janine Gericke. Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with an achingly slow motion shot of Kirsten Dunst, looking drenched and disturbed as birds tumble from the sky behind her. As the audience stares, hushed and humbled, Wagner’s Tristan and Islode – brought to life by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra – saturates the scene. This is the end […]
The Future (2011)
By Jacob Mertens. When we are young, we are told that we can do anything with our lives. We feel our path unfold before us, a wide expanse of possibility. However, as we get older that very freedom can become frightening, and we yearn for something calm and simple. In […]
Saving London’s Cinema Museum: From Hammer to Chainsaw – Horror of the Sixties and Seventies
By Deirdre O’Neill. The horror film genre has never enjoyed the respectable status of other genres such as the western or the thriller, rather, it has, to a greater or lesser extent, remained the property of the committed fan and cult film devotee. Indeed, one of the pleasures in watching […]
Drive (2011)
By Jacob Mertens. Moving towards an aggressive theater launch, Drive has featured a lot of dizzying, full throttle marketing ploys that suggest Hollywood escapist thrills. The poster is all grit and masculine energy, Rotten Tomatoes has posted an interview claiming that Drive is Ryan Gosling’s “superhero movie”[1], and the trailers […]