By Elias Savada. Not your conventional Holocaust documentary…. Fragments get incessantly replayed, slowed down, reversed, enlarged, and otherwise altered to sniff out clues and provide context, sometimes agonizingly so.” This genealogical gumshoe of a documentary starts with three-plus minutes of silent home movie footage, accompanied only by the sound of […]
“Everything is political”: An Interview with Costa-Gavras
By Yun-hua Chen. Thriller is a way to tell a story about society. Political thrillers are movies about people in a particular situation…. Everything is political.” To celebrate the Greek-French auteur Costa-Gavras’ nearly 60 years of filmmaking, the Locarno Film Festival awarded him with the lifetime achievement award of 2022 […]
Far from These Shores: Guy Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital (Redux)(1988)
By Thomas M. Puhr. This 64-minute fever dream exudes a confidence and singularity of vision rarely seen in debuts.” Angels float in an ink black sky. The camera descends from these heavens, past wispy clouds, and settles at street level, where a spotlight shines on the entrance sign to Gimli […]
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Mr. Malcom’s List (Emma Holly Jones, 2022)
By Theresa Rodewald. Not every film has to reinvent the formula and for some viewers, Mr. Malcom’s List, with its delightful performances, will be the perfect film for a rainy day or a cozy movie night with friends. Those viewers looking for a more daring approach to the period drama […]
Sacheen Littlefeather, American Hero
By Gary D. Rhodes. Some on planet earth were ready to hear Littlefeather. Too many in Hollywood were not, alas, thus tarnishing the tinsel in Tinseltown.” Sacheen Littlefeather, the civil rights activist and actor booed by many attendees at the 1973 Academy Awards, has passed away at the age of 75. […]
A Little Lynch for Fletch: An Interview with Kyle MacLachlan
By Ali Moosavi. I think with movies sometimes whether the movie is good or bad isn’t necessarily the criteria anymore. It becomes about do you want to spend time in the world of that movie.” Kyle MacLachlan’s name will forever be associated with the role of agent Dale Cooper and […]
Regeneration in Tokyo: Masashi Yamamoto’s Robinson’s Garden (1987)
By Thomas M. Puhr. A true lost classic, one which should find the wider audience it so richly deserves.” Kani Releasing’s best offering to date, Masashi Yamamoto’s Robinson’s Garden (Robinson no niwa, 1987) is a revelation, the type of overlooked gem that blasts any modest expectations you might have for […]
Facing the Consequences: An Interview with Michael Winterbottom on Eleven Days in May
By Yun-hua Chen. The idea from the beginning was that we wanted to be very simple, as a sort of a memorial for those children that died, and focus on their families, the mothers, brothers and sisters who loved the children, and focus on what they miss about the them […]
US Sport and Its Complexities: Filmmakers Tommy Walker and Ross Hockrow on Kaepernick & America
By Anees Aref. What makes this story one of those things you want to grab a hold of, is that you’re able to utilize sports, which a huge portion of our society spends an extraordinary amount of time diving into. So, if you can use that to bring in the […]
We Can’t Go Home Again: Kevin Smith’s Clerks III
By James Slaymaker. The quality of Clerks III hardly matters. It is, by all conventional standards of critical assessment, a fiasco – a dramatically inert, visually flat, poorly paced mess from start to finish. Yet, for those of us susceptible to Smith’s charms, the handmade, ‘let’s put on a show’ […]