By Christopher Sharrett. A portrait of female disintegration to a point that [the film] has been termed a horror film, an extreme designation, but not wholly inaccurate.” I saw Spencer at its opening, but I’ve waited to comment on it until I could view it carefully on Blu-ray, such is […]
A Disaster Waiting to Happen: The Burning Sea
By Anees Aref. An activist film that also works as a solid piece of entertainment.” What would it be like to watch a pending natural disaster, only seeing it now, that is? That’s the feeling one gets watching The Burning Sea, a timely new Norwegian film directed by John Andreas […]
Enchanting But Overstuffed: Brian Petsos’s Big Gold Brick
By Elias Savada. Petsos likes to mix some old-fashioned, heavy-handed whimsy with oddball characters, then sprinkle in a ton of exuberance. Maybe too much.” You might recognize the name Brian Petsos, but most of you are thinking “Who?” After watching his feature directorial debut Big Gold Brick, you might be […]
Against the “Purity Laws of Cinema”: An Interview with Isabelle Stever on Grand Jeté (Berlinale 2022)
By Yun-hua Chen. The gender concept is now so flexible. And that, I find quite appealing. The not quite so ordinary thing in this film is that here a woman is the perpetrator, and the story is told from her perspective and this perspective remains unpunished.” German director Isabelle Stever’s […]
A Birth Raising Social and Moral Dilemmas in Iran: Until Tomorrow (Berlinale 2022)
By Ali Moosavi. Asgari has delivered his most accomplished socially aware thriller.” Ali Asgari made his name in cinema by making short films. These films were often co-written or co-directed with Farnoosh Samadi and won many awards at various festivals. These successes did not go unnoticed by the US Academy […]
A Continual Journey: The Truth at Twenty-Four Frames Per Second by Anthony Slide
A Book Review by Tony Williams. It’s a quarter to three. There’s no one in the place except you and me.” What does one do in these pandemic times when travelling to the UK to interview surviving family members of a now forgotten British comedian becomes impossible, let alone finding […]
Populist Fables: Law and Order and The Beast of the City
By Geoff Mayer. The below is excerpted from Hollywood’s Melodramatic Imagination: Film Noir, the Western and Other Genres from the 1920s to the 1950s (McFarland Publishers) by Geoff Mayer. All rights reserved. While sensational melodrama is structured as a fundamental bipolar clash between moral absolutes, the specific moral, political and […]
Sting in the Tail: Filmmaker Avalon Fast on Honeycomb (Slamdance)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. These girls were actively looking for a way out, and to create separation between themselves and the world they gladly left behind. I think they felt more comfortable living in their new world the way they wanted, and controlling when others were allowed to experience and judge […]
A Big Slice of Fondness: Lisa Hurwitz’s The Automat
By Elias Savada. The Automat shouldn’t be looked at as a eulogy [1902-1991], but as a celebration of its long and mostly successful life.” “The food was delicious…the price was right.” So says the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in Lisa Hurwitz’s affectionate look at the lost era […]
Drifting Through New York: Justin Zuckerman’s Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater
By Thomas Puhr. As a whole, Lisa’s journey feels all the more real thanks to this unpolished packaging – proof positive that you can achieve all kinds of magic with one camera and some game, engaging performers in front of it.” The “love letter to New York” subgenre is beyond […]