By Gary M. Kramer. Wild Mountain Thyme does provide some simple pleasures but suggests that Shanley is a far better writer than director.” John Patrick Shanley is well known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck, and better known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Doubt, for which he also won […]
Justice for Alternative Identities: Queer Japan
By Matthew Fullerton. A welcomed addition to a wonderful run, in recent years, of international documentaries highlighting the experiences, struggles, and successes of LGBTQ people in countries not normally associated with sensitivity toward LGBTQ activism.” Queer Japan, from Canadian filmmaker Graham Kolbeins and Altered Innocence, an American distributor of artistic […]
A Long Trail to Continue: Women in the Western
Unforgiven (John Huston, 1960) A Book Review by Tanja Bresan. These extensive and reference-filled essays prove [that] the role of women in the Western was often as an additional accessory, dubious and regularly mistreated, but never not important or secondary.” Director Anthony Mann famously said, “without a woman the Western […]
Brave New (Digital) World – Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator
eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. While the author certainly won’t win over any Luddites…his intriguing, if stiflingly dense, analysis offers much for the adventurous reader to chew on.” It’s tempting to think of a film as an external, discrete object – one passively observed and, […]
Honor Long Overdue: Da Five Bloods
By Johnnie Hobbs III. While Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee’s first war drama, suffers from its myriad of storylines, it seems that Da 5 Bloods is the beneficiary of a lesson learned.” Recently, I asked my father about his time in the army and how it’s affected his life. […]
Conspiracy Melodrama to Psychological Tragedy: From JFK to Nixon
Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995) By Carl Freedman. In the metaphorical terms of Nixon’s political family romance, we might say that Lincoln is the ancestral forefather and Eisenhower the father. Kennedy, then, is the sibling (the younger sibling, indeed), and the 1960 presidential contest can be understood as a kind of symbolic […]
Not Like You Remember: On Darius Marder’s The Sound of Metal
By Zoe Kurland. We too feel the disastrous consequences: one dramatic pop and the sound is yanked from our clutches, leaving both the audience and Ruben underwater.” In a 1998 interview for Guitar World, The Smashing Pumpkins’ front man Billy Corgan described Heavy Metal as “a universal energy.” “It’s the sound […]
Boundless Attraction: Ana’s Desire
By Gary M. Kramer. “Remains intriguing….uncomfortable, but never exploitative.” The feature directorial debut by Emilio Santoyo, Ana’s Desire, opens with static shots and silence. Ana (Laura Agorreca) lives with her cute young son Mateo (Ian Garcia Monterrubio, charming, never cloying). She cares for him, and tends to her plants, until […]
Reworking and Immersion: AFI European Union Film Showcase 2020
Grimm re-edit (Alex van Warmerdam) By Gary M. Kramer. The AFI European Union Film Showcase, being held virtually at https://afisilver.afi.com/ December 2-20, offers an eclectic assortment of nearly 50 films. Here is rundown of a half dozen impressive features screening at this year’s fest. Writer/director Jurgis Matulevicius’s auspicious debut, Isaac, […]
Cherishing the Legendary Haruomi Hosono: No Smoking
By Matthew Fullerton. Charming in that it strikes a fine balance of chronology and intimate, and often amusing, interludes of today’s seventy-something Hosono.” Japan’s Brian Eno, Neil Young, and Mark Mothersbaugh are just a few of the allusions bandied about by diehard fans of musician, singer-songwriter, composer, producer, and all-round […]