By Ali Moosavi. For these girls it was such an intense month of failed attempts, sleepless nights, terrifying moments that at the end was sort of a blur. While they have memories of how they felt in those moments, it was on me to figure out the timeline. I had […]
Scorsese’s Night Moves: After Hours (1985)
By Jeremy Carr. Scorsese’s follow-up to The King of Comedy (1982) can be as stressed as any thriller or even a horror film, or as ostensibly innocuous and banal as a plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese paperweight.” It starts with a pen that doesn’t work, just as he’s […]
The “Idiot Trier” Redux: The Kingdom Exodus
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Undeniably clunky plotpoint aside – and it is, admittedly, a pretty major one that’s hard to miss – The Kingdom Exodus is otherwise a playful, spooky and at times genuinely moving return.” With the passing of legendary Swedish actor Ernst-Hugo Järegård in 1998, Lars von Trier said […]
Starting from Scratch: Asmae ElMoudir on The Mother of All Lies (Kadib Abyad)
By Yun-hua Chen. For the story that I wanted to tell, there were no pictures and no proofs of what happened. I just started with one picture, and I finished with 500 hours of footage. I wanted to tell the story, but how I tell this story should be different.” […]
In the World of Pre-Code: Geoffrey O’Brien on Arabian Nights of 1934
By William Blick. My novel is not so much talk about these movies as a story that inhabits their world, as if in the mind of a young spectator – an intelligent adolescent, say, old enough to have a growing awareness of the movies’ frequent unreality and still young enough […]
A Commodified Future: Sophie Barthes on The Pod Generation
By Ali Moosavi. When I wrote this film I had no idea [that the advance of AI] would happen so fast…. We have to talk about it and raise the questions; is that the world that we want?” Writer-director Sophie Barthes was born in France but grew up in South […]
Into the Universe: Filmmaker Daphné Baiwir on King on Screen
By Leo Collis. “I really wanted to give the audience the feeling that they were entering the Stephen King universe.” The chances are, whether knowingly or not, you’ve seen a Stephen King adaptation on screen. The prolific author from Portland, Maine, has written over 50 books, and he has inspired […]
Tom Mix Rides Again: Sky High (1922) and The Big Diamond Robbery (1929)
By Jeremy Carr. Although many Mix pictures are lost, these illustrative entries showcase his customary assurance, his virtue, and his penchant for showmanship.” If Hollywood’s classic Western heroes are generally given little positive thought these days, the cowboy celebrities of the silent era in particular are even less familiar. In […]
Life During Wartime: Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike (2022)
By Thomas Puhr. This film about the Donbas region of Ukraine that borders Russia, set in 2014, features images that are hauntingly beautiful as often as they are simply haunting.” Maryna Er Gorbach’s searing Klondike (2022) takes place in 2014 Ukraine, in the Donbas area that borders Russia. Although the […]
Recognizing Belafonte
By Robert K. Lightning. If Poitier’s films frequently situate him as an integrationist hero, successfully negotiating the rocky path to white acceptance, Belafonte’s films typically chart a very different path where acceptance is not always the goal, making him often Poitier’s cinematic antithesis.” With the announcement of Harry Belafonte’s death […]