A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. It’s hard to think of a genre filmmaker today capable of going so far out on the ledge of bad taste while maintaining an artistic skill that ranks them with the best of the horror masters. In this sense, Stuart Gordon remains one-of-a-kind: […]
Genre-Blending, Gender, and Subversive Views of Sexuality and Mental Health: Perspectives on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. An engaging read for both longstanding fans of the show and first-time viewers.” Despite its deceptive title Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CW, 2015-19) proves to be rather nuanced in its address to this ostensibly negative trope by examining issues of obsession, mental health, plurisexuality, and […]
Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
By Andrew H. Fisher. Taken together, their careers allows us to see Hollywood Indians as agents of film history, rather than merely as objects of the cinematic gaze.” During the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood seemed to be full of chiefs but not enough Indians. Thanks to the […]
Katabasis and News of the World
By Ken Hall. The journey undertaken by Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks)…through Texas causes him to pass through ‘alien territory’ in a double sense. He is not closely acquainted with some of the locales which he encounters nor with the routes to those locales. Perhaps more important is the underlying strangeness of the […]
Finding That Simple Place: An Interview with Katie Holmes on Directing Alone Together
By Matthew Sorrento. It was important to show the true experience of what happened [during the pandemic], which was New York thriving, it seemed, then, all of the sudden, complete shutdown – just disbelief that something like that can happen so quickly to a city that brings so much joy […]
All A-bored: Bullet Train
By Elias Savada. Style only goes so far in the case of Bullet Train. It can’t make up for all the other problems, especially the leaky script, self-destructing humor, and bland visual effects.” The bland zen-casual jokes that abound in Bullet Train — a boldly-stylized, hyper-exaggerated adaptation of popular Japanese […]
Georgia in Transformation: Ioseb ‘Soso’ Bliadze and Taki Mumladze on A Room of My Own (KVIFF 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. When we were writing the script, I was thinking that it might be very hard to finance this film. When we applied for some funds, they are more interested in other topics than topics about young people. In Georgia, young people are radically different from their parents […]
One Man’s Gutsy Final Journey – Jack Has a Plan
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!” […]