By Jeremy Carr. Nearly everyone encountered expresses some sort of erratic behavior, which does give the film a sense of genuine spontaneity and hysterical possibility.” There is a popular social media trend where someone posts a seemingly innocuous video in which something unexpected then occurs. This is usually accompanied by […]
Slashing Names Off that Naughty List: Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. The setup is little more than window dressing for a number of set pieces (some clever, others tedious) in which our hero kicks major ass, John McClane-style.” After about 1,000 years, even the most glamorous job loses some of its luster. Such is the experience of […]
“I think we killed off Jean-Luc Godard”: An Interview with Christophe Honoré
By Ali Moosavi. It is not that Jean-Luc Godard is better than Xavier Dolan. That is impossible to say, but their idea of cinema is not the same. Maybe the world today doesn’t need cinema anymore.” Christophe Honoré is a multi-talented French artist. He is a novelist, actor, director of […]
Superfan Service: Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77 (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. Not unlike the rough cut of a certain sci-fi epic, 5-25-77 exhibits a scrappy charm. Still, I’d leave this one to superfans and nostalgia junkies only.” “Most of this is true. The rest is even truer,” the opening text to Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77 (2022) declares. […]
Rebellion and Cataclysm: Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue (1980)
By Christopher Sharrett. Hopper’s is a surprisingly radical statement for a filmmaker known for his very inconsistent political thinking.” What to say about Dennis Hopper? In his day he could be a pain in the neck, publicly brandishing his neuroses, failures, and addictions – in the new Severin edition of […]
Documenting the Cinema of Iran: An Interview with Bahman Maghsoudlou
By Ali Moosavi. In Razor’s Edge: The Legacy of Iranian Actresses, I showed their true worth and high place in the cinema. Some people who used to look down at these actresses from a high moral platform as cheap women, were crying at the screenings and saying how sorry they […]
A Magnetic Mystery: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
By Jeremy Carr. Lynch at his storytelling best.” David Lynch can tell a pretty standard story when he wants to. While films like The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and The Straight Story (1999) surely have their moments of classically “Lynchian” eccentricity, their fundamental plots unfold along relatively orthodox […]
May the (Weird Floating) Quartz Be With You – Something in the Dirt
By Elias Savada. With Moorhead&Benson’s latest feature, they’re back in front of the camera, playing the two neighborly leads in this satirical, self-parodying Hollywood Hills nightmare of their own making.” The “intergalactic geniuses” Moorhead&Benson, a.k.a. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, are back to their deviously genre-bending antics for their fifth […]
Nocebos and Placebos: An Interview with Lorcan Finnegan on Nocebo
By Ali Moosavi. Without Name was probably the most oblique kind of minimalist film we’ve done and then obviously Vivarium is a quite surreal film…. With Nocebo it was quite a different challenge where we were basing the story in the real world in a domestic environment and then making […]
Jack of All Trades – Louis Malle: Interviews
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. The cumulative effect of this collection, therefore, is nothing short of revelatory. All the more reason to revisit the director’s wildly unpredictable – and consistently exceptional – body of work.” Louis Malle is hard to pin down. The French director’s genre-hopping – film […]