By Elias Savada. [With] a low-key ghoulish humor…Jack Has a Plan bookends the moments of Jack’s emotional departure with an audio-visual scrapbook of memories and some lovely discoveries.” There’s a low-key ghoulish humor that welcomes viewers to this documentary: “Formaldehyde Films Presents,” especially since this life-affirming story is all about […]
The Future of the Outdoor Experience: An Interview with April Wright on Back to the Drive-in
By Ali Moosavi. Most of the filmmakers that we consider greats talk about how they fell in love with cinema by going to see films at the drive-in or going to see them at movie palaces. We might have a generation now that feels different about cinema because they have […]
Not Alone: Akiko Ohku’s Tremble All You Want (Kani Releasing)
By Thomas Puhr. The kind of release that makes you appreciate the untapped reservoir (at least for Western audiences) that is contemporary world cinema, and wish for more home video releases like it.” When we first see Yoshika, she is knee deep in a quarter-life crisis. “I’m such a wimp!” […]
Trauma, Born Again: Resurrection (2022)
By Jeremy Carr. Resurrection moves along at a generally foreboding pace with efficiently intermittent revelations and expository arrangements, largely motivated by Semans’ devious direction, Hall’s multifaceted performance, and the outlandishness of its expectant impetus.” Margaret has it all figured out. She’s successful and in control at work, presiding over her […]
Collective War Trauma and Moments of Fragility: An Interview with Hirotoshi Takeoka on Adamiani (2021)
By Yun-hua Chen. After the Chechen Wars, many changes happened. Refugees and guerrilla fighters from Chechnya had a major impact on the Islamic faith of the Kist people in Pankisi. Leila and her daughter, Mariam, represent these two generations before and after the Chechen Wars.” Adamiani, screened at the international […]
A Subtle Kind of Heroism: From Where They Stood
By Michael Sandlin. From Where They Stood shows that documentary filmmaking – used by the Allies during WWII to bring the true scope of Nazi concentration camp horror into the public eye in the first place – can still shed historically relevant light on the Holocaust eighty-some years later.” Although […]
Fist in the Fire: Wang Yu’s One-Armed Boxer (Arrow Video)
By Thomas Puhr. This ‘plot’ is mostly window dressing for a series of increasingly complicated (and ridiculous) fight sequences. These set pieces are impressively choreographed and shot…boasting the kind of excessive violence similar genre exercises promise yet don’t always deliver.” The good people at Arrow Video may have the market […]
Language and Love: An Interview with Filmmaker Tomasz Wasilewski on Fools (KVIFF 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. This film is also about motherhood, mutual love, becoming a mother again when you are a very mature woman, loneliness, and all those difficult emotions which are so powerful in this film and our life. I did not want the confirmation of the taboo to be the […]
The Rules of the Game: Laura Wandel’s Playground
By Christopher Sharrett. Wandel has us pondering a crucial concern: is education predicated on patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as would seem most obvious, or do we confront, at this level of human development, some inherent savagery in the species (a problem with ‘human nature’)?” I was very happy to read on this […]
Of Time and the City – Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
By James Slaymaker. But the overarching ambition of Dreaming Walls is to preserve an image of the Chelsea Hotel while there is still some semblance of the creative spirit which one animated it remaining.” Early in Maya Duverdier and Amélie van Elmbt’s elegant, mournful documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea […]