By Alex Ramon. The mix of the gritty and the romantic here feels fresh. Ultimately, the film is tender in tone, with unexpected humorous flashes that don’t feel forced.” Premiering at Tribeca, and featured in the Polonica strand of Polish Film Festival in Gdynia and at Raindance 2022, Michał Chmielewski’s […]
Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin
By Elias Savada. Pain, grief, disorientation, and a dash of violence are soulfully plotted together by McDonagh, with his vision so wonderfully conveyed through the expressive chemistry of Farrell and Gleeson.” Martin McDonagh makes marvelous, crazy, fiercely creative movies filled with wildly inventive characters. He also writes lots of plays […]
Adaptation, and the “Elite Community” of Filmmaking: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
By Ali Moosavi. As an overall trend I’m thinking the world is in a very precarious situation at the moment and why is it that the majority of films at this major film festival are about this elite community of film makers and artists and conductors and intellectuals? That did […]
One Family’s Dirty, Drunken Laundry: For I Know My Weakness
By Elias Savada. A raw journey into immersive filmmaking, asking for a wide berth when it comes to social ethics.” With over half-a-million homeless people in the United States today, most folks treat them as a plague. Some toss a few coins or dollars their way when they’re panhandling at […]
A Growing Influence – Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market
A Book Review Essay by Dina Iordanova. Author Ying Zhu reflects the changing fortunes of Hollywood in China and shows clearly that Chinese film culture can exist both with and without Hollywood.” In the fall of 2016 l had a two-month long stint as visiting professor at the Beijing Film […]
Victims Performing the Victimized: Houman Seyyedi’s World War Three
By Ali Moosavi. With the rather unsure state of the Iranian cinema at the moment, it remains to be seen what the future holds for WWIII and its talented director.” I have been a fan of the young Iranian filmmaker Houman Seyyedi ever since I saw his sophomore directing feature […]
Mad Love: Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022)
By James Slaymaker. Decision to Leave builds a sense of tragic weight more potent than anything else in Chan-wook’s oeuvre.” Park Chan-wook’s new film, Decision to Leave, may appear at first glance to be an uncharacteristically straight police procedural drama. Its set-up is pure pulp: Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is a […]
Global Change and Local Protest in Thailand: An Interview with Sorayos Prapapan on Arnold is the Model Student (2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. After Covid, young generation started to think in a totally different way. That’s why the Bad Students movement came into being…. Young people don’t shut up anymore. They know that this country has a problem, and they are not indifferent.” The Thai filmmaker Sorayos Prapapan has an […]
‘I play with what I have’: An Interview with Juliette Binoche
By Ali Moosavi. I love what I do. It’s not being an actress… it’s being in the moment of work.” If I had to pick half a dozen of cinema’s greatest actresses working today, then Juliette Binoche would undoubtedly be among them. She is just an amazing actress and a […]
A Quality Melodramatic Framework: The Americans (FX, 2013-2018) by Linda Mizejewski
By Ken Hall. A key to the innovative nature of this series, according to Mizejewski, is its presentation of espionage thriller elements within ‘domestic melodrama.’” The compelling television series The Americans (FX, 2013-18) is presented as a landmark example of “quality” television production in this fine study. In her new […]