By Noah Charney. Over the last century, agents have established themselves as necessary middlemen between talent (writers, actors, directors, DOPs…) and producers who wish to work with such talent on projects for screens, large and small. Producers could have just called up the talent directly, but they didn’t. A tradition […]
Prima Donna, Front and Center: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth
By Elias Savada. Catherine Deneuve, the graceful doyenne of French cinema, continues to amaze at 76. In Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s new French film, La Vérité (The Truth) – his first in a non-native language – he has created Fabienne Dangeville as the self-centered star. It’s a Frankensteinian role that […]
Humans, Nature, and Moving Images – The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema by Gabriella Blasi
T. R. Merchant-Knudsen
July 6, 2020
A Book Review Essay by T. R. Merchant-Knudsen. Terrence Malick’s name remains tinged with a sense of mystique and the aura of philosophical images within his sprawling films. His filmography echoes and reverberates through time in ways that often appear nonlinear; in these places, images of nature and their intersection […]
Buster Keaton’s Genius, Derailed: The Cameraman (Criterion Collection)
By Thomas Gladysz. Film history is littered with the stories of stars whose careers were derailed by their studios, and themselves. Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim are two of the best known examples. Each saw their careers go off the tracks for reasons that had as much to do […]
What’s in the Bag?: An Interview with Harold Holscher, Director of The Soul Collector (AKA 8)
By Ali Moosavi. The term “horror film” is often used as a short cut for a variety of movies that contain either scares, suspense or, on rare occasions, both. Therefore, it includes everything from slasher movies to psychological horror; from stories based on normal everyday life to those containing para-normal […]
Film Scratches: July 2020
Film Scratches is a blog by David Finkelstein focusing on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. Serial Seduction: Film About a Father Who (2020) Film About a Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ absorbing feature length […]
Homewrecker Leaves You Speechless
“Sisterhood has not been this menacingly funny since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?“ By Elias Savada. There’s a devilish wink running through this (mostly) housebound tale of two generations setting off against one another. In one corner is Linda (Precious Chong, daughter of Tommy, who also helped finance the film […]
Learning to Tell a Story: Scorsese Shorts (Criterion Collection)
By John Duncan Talbird. In 1974, soon after the splash of Mean Streets (1973), his first major directorial success, Martin Scorsese made a documentary about his parents, Italianamerican. Aside from still photos of the family and archival footage of Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood during the early 20th century, the film […]
On the Queen and Her People – Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
By Ali Moosavi. She has been called The First Lady of Song and Queen of Jazz, titles which Ella Fitzgerald truly earned. In the documentary, Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things (2019), veteran British documentary filmmaker Leslie Woodhead charts Ella’s life from becoming a teenage orphan, running away from […]
Rise of the Female Director: Liberating Hollywood by Maya Montañez Smuckler
Madeline Hawk
July 1, 2020
A New Leaf (Elaine May, 1971) A Book Review Essay by Madeline Hawk. 83 years after Dorothy Arzner became the first female to direct a Hollywood feature film in 1927, Kathryn Bigelow became the first to win an Oscar for Best Director in 2010. But what happened in the 83 […]