By Daria Kabanova. A man walks into a conference room where a Formula One pre-race meeting is about to begin. The camera loves the man’s face, even though it is tired, conflicted, frustrated. The room is full of people, but the camera is only marginally interested in them: it follows […]
Print, the Legend: Andrew Rossi on Page One – Inside the New York Times
By Matthew Sorrento. In the early 1930s, just after the birth of sound in movies, an older medium was running through the newer one. Newspaper movies, or reporter characters onscreen, regularly appeared to remind viewers that events are only as vital as how they are covered. The great newspaper films […]
The Housemaid (South Korea, 2010)
By Daniel Lindvall. The original version of The Housemaid (1960) is often listed among the two or three best South Korean films of all time by local critics. The film and its director, Kim Ki-young (1922-98), were (re-)discovered internationally a little more than a decade ago. Kim, who started his […]
Wine Before the Massacre
By Rajko Radovic. Before picking up an automatic weapon a man savours a glass or two of a vintage wine. He wants the moment to last. He looks around and sees his surroundings with new eyes. Then comes the police uniform. He masks himself so he can become what he […]
Chris Cunningham Live
By Jamie Isbell. A large black curtain slowly parts and reveals three grey screens. Then a dense and inconsistent ripple of excitement erupts from a shuffling and enthusiastically rowdy crowd flooding the Roundhouse in North London on this evening of June 1st, 2011. It takes a few minutes of chants […]
The Implication of “WOW”
By Gary McMahon. “Films should be made with innocence,” someone said Orson Welles said, and someone else said Charles Laughton knew exactly what Welles meant if indeed he said it when Laughton directed his own first-time masterpiece. Let’s not get hung up on whether and when Welles said it and […]
The Spirit of Journalism: Requiem for News of the World
By Celluloid Liberation Front. ‘Representation is a denial of participation’ (Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi in The Green Book) ‘They can sneer all they like, I’ll keep the 15000 extra copies’ (Keith Rupert Murdoch) Slap the Monster on Page One gave the title to Marco Bellocchio’s film about media manipulation of social […]
Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production, John Berra, (2008)
Book review by Sebastian Manley. Variously characterised as an American art cinema, a B-division of Hollywood, and a marketplace of talent and ideas, the US ‘independent’ sector has inspired a good deal of stimulating debate and speculation since its inception. In this decade in particular, independent film has been the […]
Edinburgh Film Festival | 15-26 June, 2011
By Yun-hua Chen. This year’s EIFF feels very different in all aspects, not only led by the new producer Jimmy Mulligan but also affected by the general budget cut in the UK. It is thus an interesting occasion to observe how film festivals tackle restraining material resources. Instead of red […]
Silverdocs Film Festival, 20-26 June, 2011
July 6, 2011
By Gary M. Kramer. Silverdocs, at the AFI Silver Spring, MD, is the biggest American festival for non-fiction film. This year’s slate featured several observational documentaries, including El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Wetzel, 2010) and El Velador (Almada, 2011). Here are some observations about a half dozen films featured at […]