By Elias Savada. Over-the-top action (and) ludicrous to the max, yet if you expel all your notions of common sense, there’s a chance you might enjoy it.” A couple of senior citizens – longtime movie icons, too – walk into a big city bar and start a fight. One is […]
Selling the Digital Revolution: Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley on makeSHIFT
By Gary M. Kramer. As a consumer, advertising is intrusive. As an industry, we want to do better. This film and its participants are hopefully an example of that.” makeSHIFT is Casey Suchan and Tim Cawley’s nifty, zippy documentary about how the advertising industry has adapted to technological advances and […]
Animation from Lockdown: An Interview with Matteo Bernardini
By Alex Ramon. I had to invent a style of my own mostly because I am both a director and an illustrator but not an animator…. this is what drew me to think out of the box, becoming aware of both my limits and my strengths.” The recipient of the […]
What’s Seen and Heard: Barak Barkan’s Silence & Darkness
By Johnnie Hobbs III. A subtle indie thriller…chock-full of slow-burning tension and wonderful performances.” When do secrets and control masked as love become acts of sheer violence? The subtly eerie psychological thriller Silence & Darkness looks to explore this question. Led by first-time feature film writer-director Barak Barkan, Silence & […]
From Milquetoast to Mayhem: Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody
By Elias Savada. Suburban, hum-drum life turns into a darkly orchestrated example of a revenge….” As Ilya Naishuller’s Nobody takes its first steps, Hutch Mansell is one glum family man, stuck in a middle-age existence as an alternate-universe Walter Mitty, one with a dormant and well-hidden, action-powered past. But a […]
A Half Century of Social Critique: An Interview with Documentarian Anand Patwardhan
By Devapriya Sanyal. One shouldn’t underestimate the power of factual documentary cinema in a world where facts are so often distorted or hidden.” Many have called him the Michael Moore of India, even if his career precedes the American filmmaker’s by decades. Anand Patwardhan has won both national and international […]
An Unsung “Free Cinema”: Celebrating Lindsay Anderson
Anderson directing This Sporting Life (1963) with Richard Harris
The World is Their Puppet: The Taub Brothers’ Externo
By Elias Savada. No, this isn’t The Big Short, and Margot Robbie is nowhere in sight, but I wonder what the financial world might think of this film.” Is it possible for someone with just $2,000 to ultimately own the world? That’s the most unusual hypothesis behind Leandro and Jonathan […]
Bloodsuckers: A Marxist Vampire Comedy at Berlinale 2021 – An Interview with Julian Radlmaier
By Yun-hua Chen. Marx wrote [Capital] in the 19th century, a high time of Gothic novels…. It made me think, why not just to do a real Marxist film and use the same metaphors as Marx?” Selected by the Berlinale’s Encounters section, Bloodsuckers is the German-French director Julian Radlmaier’s second […]