Critic and Film International contributor Alexandra Heller-Nicholas discusses her 2020 book 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media) on the Rutgers University-Camden site. A few quotes from the interview: “1000 Women in Horror was a very different kind of project (than my other books) yet again, but I guess it still had […]
Crises Around the Globe: Three from Berlinale 2021
By Ali Moosavi. Writer-director Igor Drljaca shows us the wide gap and the glaring contrast between the haves and have nots in Sarajevo.” In Tabija / The White Fortress, Faruk (Pavle Cemerikic) is a young Muslim boy living in Sarajevo. His mother has passed away and since his parents were […]
Trusting the Process: Oscar Contender Maria Sødahl on Hope
By Robin Gregory. Hope is also about blended family, the modern family, the structures and mechanics of that. For example, how you love differently or the same, stepchildren versus biological children. All of these things can have taboos around them (that) I wanted to explore.” Cancer is not for the faint […]
Mystical Recognition in the Czechoslovak New Wave
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, 1970 By Levan Tskhovrebadze. Most of the features of the period are meticulous representations of social wonders and miracles.” In 1964, Czech critic Antonín J. Liehm described Czechoslovak New Wave as a “film miracle.”[i] Later, producer Carlo Ponti successfully introduced to western society cinema […]
An Iranian-American Director Takes on Feminist Horror: Natasha Kermani on Lucky
Star and Screenwriter Brea Grant By Ali Moosavi. It is feminist in the sense that it is about a woman’s experience and the whole movie is a deep dive into that experience.” Natasha Kermani is a young Iranian-American film director, working in independent cinema. She has three feature films under […]
A Deadpan Crime Comedy: Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out (2018)
By Gary M. Kramer. Keep an Eye Out juggles so many different styles of farcical humor and manipulates the police genre that its few lapses can be forgiven.” French writer/director Quentin Dupieux makes idiosyncratic films that either charm or annoy viewers. Folks who admire the cheekiness of his 2010 breakout […]
A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother: Ivan Kavanagh’s Son
By Thomas Puhr. A well-crafted genre exercise…[that] ultimately offers mere glimpses of what made The Canal so strange and surprising. One of the great joys of our streaming era is the discovery – usually after scrolling through dozens of bottom drawer B-movies – of an overlooked horror film: one that […]
Dinner Served Darkly: Michael Mayer’s Happy Times
By Elias Savada. There is plenty of dark humor to be found in this Israeli-American hybrid from Haifa-born and Los Angeles-based director Michael Mayer…[a] horror excursion into impolite Los Angeles manners….” Don’t let the title fool you. What looks like happiness on the surface ain’t what’s underneath. Nowhere. No how. […]
Trzebinia, the Small Town: Tomasz Jurkiewicz’s Everyone Has a Summer (Każdy ma swoje lato)
By Alex Ramon. This modest small-town-set charmer, the debut fiction feature of its director, operates with a stealth subversiveness that proves all the more refreshing.” The biggest splashes in Polish cinema over the turbulent past twelve months have been made by two films: Mariusz Wilczyński’s Berlinale success Kill It and […]
Expanding the Dialog on National Cinemas: an Interview with MK Raghavendra
Zibahkhana (Hell’s Ground, Pakistan, 2007) By Devapriya Sanyal. MK Raghavendra, a film critic and leading scholar of Indian cinema, has authored eight books with leading publishers to date. He offers fresh and invaluable insights into the world of Indian cinema not only restricted to studies of Hindi or Bollywood (as […]