By Ali Moosavi. What drew me to Blood was that I could play the family drama aspect of it, the torment that this mother is going through, her struggle to keep her kids healthy and safe, along with the darker supernatural subtext.” Director Brad Anderson may not be as well […]
Hell is Other People’s Kids: Roxanne Benjamin’s There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
By Thomas M. Puhr. [While] the narrative structure proves flimsy…. it’s an admirable effort, and the film’s underlying commentary on parenthood separates Benjamin’s film from some of its lazier competitors.” Children often seem to exist in a world few adults can access. They develop their own sort of language: a […]
Finding Humor in Tragedy: The Films of Iranian Director Reza Jamali
By Ali Moosavi. A new and original voice in the Iranian Cinemas whose films deserve to find a wider audience.” With only two feature films to his credit, Iranian writer-director Reza Jamali has emerged as a new and unique voice in the Iranian cinema. Both his films, Old Men Never […]
Adolescent Hell: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful Beings (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Different doesn’t always mean good, and while I admire the many risks Beautiful Beings takes, I walked away from it with a shrug of indifference.” Everyone at Balli’s school seems to have agreed he’s the designated punching bag. In class, the girl next to him skooches […]
Waste and the Human-Machine Relationship: An Interview with Nikolaus Geyrhalter on Matter Out of Place
By Yun-hua Chen. They were scenes that were a bit more exchangeable; we could choose and find different ways of shooting these scenes, and we were not depending on one specific location. In the end, we found locations that could show that there is a problem.” Austrian Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter […]
Lost Time: Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Debuting filmmaker Charlotte Wells isn’t a promising new writer-director with an emerging voice; her voice is already there, crystal clear.” Time dilates when you’re on vacation. Days spent lounging at the pool and wandering around the hotel become pleasantly lethargic. You can almost trick yourself into […]
An Ardent Appreciation – Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
A Book Review by Jeremy Carr. While Klawans routinely sings the praises of Sturges, he also expresses an evenhanded awareness of certain shortcomings, making this critical analysis from Columbia University Press a perceptive, exceptionally well-composed and earnest evaluation.” Lest there be any doubt about Stuart Klawans’s regard for the subject […]
Ruminations on the American Haunted House Genre – The Newest TV Additions are…Canadian
SurrealEstate (CTV Sci Fi, 2021- ) and Three Pines (Prime Video, 2022- ) * By Melanie A. Marotta. “Houses don’t kill people. People kill people.” –Armand Gamache, Three Pines (2022; episode 3) On October 25, 2022, the Syfy channel’s social media accounts posted a video of Tim Rozon (Luke Roman) […]
Revealing the Tommy Guns: An Interview with Carlos Conceição
By Yun-hua Chen. Most of my films are about male characters going through some sort of coming of age or the process of becoming adults even if they are at different moments of life…. When you start talking about vulnerability, you can extend into different directions.” Winner of the Europa […]
James Baldwin Abroad (and on Film)
By John Talbird. Love has never been a popular movement. And no one has ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together…by the love and passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. You can walk down the street of any city…and look […]