By Elias Savada. From this long ago shoot in Kasten’s home town of Baltimore, the film reveals itself to be a nimble, fleet (73 minutes) and well-crafted entry.” Mix a touch of Sam Raimi low-budget horror with bizzarro inspiration from sleazemeister John Waters and what do you get? Perhaps The […]
Solidarity in a New Era – An Interview with April Wright on Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story (2020)
By Yun-hua Chen. Stuntwomen really represent the larger picture of the ongoing struggle that women and people of color have had, just looking for a fair share in this industry.” Covering the span of film history, from The Perils of Pauline (1914) through Wonder Woman (1975) to Fast & Furious […]
Miranda July’s Latest Tonic: Kajillionaire
By Elias Savada. There are ample moments of lunacy and sentiment in Kajillionaire that will provide so crackling good amusement and uplift.” Miranda July’s new film is all about hard knock lives. The Dyne family – three dubious tricksters – are trying to make it through day by dreary day […]
A Surreal Soul to Sell: Jan Švankmajer’s Faust (1994)
By Jeremy Carr. Faust submits an unnerving introduction to a world defined by cumulative weirdness and instability, where physical transformation is a prevalent force engendering the potential for change….” From F.W. Murnau to Alexander Sokurov, adaptations of the Faust legend have been cinematically rendered by some of the medium’s supreme visionaries […]
Voter Suppression Strikes Back – All In: The Fight for Democracy
By Michael Sandlin. A crucial step-by-step guide to how the 1965 Voting Act in the United States has been gradually disempowered over the years.” Although All In at first appears to be just another by-the-numbers overly didactic documentary designed expressly for frustrated middle-class liberals, it would be grossly unfair not […]
Something for (Scaring) Everyone – The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film by Matt Glasby
A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Glasby’s enthusiasm for and knowledge of the genre win out and supersede any of the shortcomings.” “Best of” lists are a tricky business. Undisputed classics are both impossible to ignore and difficult to approach from a unique angle. Conversely, unexpected additions to the canon […]
Burning the Past, and the Future: Shahram Mokri’s Careless Crime
By Ali Moosavi. Careless Crime is an unsettling and dazzling achievement, using a real-life crime at the onset of the Iranian Revolution to examine cinema and its relation to reality versus illusion.” With only four feature films under his belt, the Iranian director Shahram Mokri has established himself as a […]
“Sweetheart” Strikes Back: An Interview with Roseanne Liang on Shadow in the Cloud (TIFF 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Even though it’s set during a world war, it’s not a ‘lest we forget movie’, it’s not a past based thing. It’s a movie that is about the now….this dehumanization is universal.” – Roseanne Liang With its world premiere at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, Chinese-New […]
The Anti Rape-Revenge Film: Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli on Violation (TIFF 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. There is something super cathartic about the idea of revenge, and what we recognised when first making the film is that really we’re making an anti revenge film. It’s like the film is designed to scare you not to seek revenge because of how it’s going to […]
TIFF 2020: Short Cuts
By Gary M. Kramer. The Short Cuts programs, a staple of the Toronto International Film Festival, showcases five programs of new work by established and up and coming filmmakers. Each program has a loose theme and offers a mix of narrative, animated, and documentary shorts. Here is a rundown of […]