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’ […]
Bleak Journeys: Selections from Locarno, Sarajevo and Venice 2022
By Ali Moosavi. Men of Deeds, shown at Sarajevo, hits hard at endemic corruption perpetuated by those who hold power over people, either by position and money or by using religion. Here is a look at a few films shown at this year’s film festivals in Locarno, Sarajevo and Venice. […]
For Jean-Luc Godard: 1930-2022
By Christopher Sharrett. One of the great innovators of the cinema…the supreme artist and intellectual engaged with his era.” When I first encountered Godard decades ago, I thought he might be better off writing essays rather than making films, since he seemed interested in making philosophical points about the image […]
Innate Contradiction, and Curious Amalgam of Stereotype: Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick (2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. Entertaining, and sexy for what it sets out to do, but if Hannah Horvath in Girls could self-assuredly declare herself ‘the voice of a generation,’ Sarah Jo in Sharp Stick wrestles to find a coherent voice of any kind.” The director, actor, and showrunner Lena Dunham, famous […]
The Discomfort of Strangers: Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022)
By Thomas M. Puhr. More akin to an ancient tragedy – one that looks unflinchingly at the terrible depths to which all-too-human people can sink.” Horrible things happen in Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil (2022), but it is not really a horror film. Like Salò (1975) or Martyrs (2008), it […]
The Ugliness Beneath Beauty: An Interview with Ruben Östlund on Triangle of Sadness (2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. When historians talk about [the fall of the Roman Empire], it was a very slow process at the end of which Rome is not the center of Europe or the center of the world anymore. Slowly power is shifting and going somewhere else, so the end of […]