By Tom Ue. Trinh Dinh Le Minh’s new film Goodbye Mother tells a seemingly familiar story: Van (Lanh Thanh) returns to his home in Vietnam, having been away in the US for nine years. Van brings with him his boyfriend Ian (Vo Dien Gia Huy) but the film’s focus is […]
Vampires Who Go to High School: Everyday Women’s Culture in Twilight, Dracula, and Fifty Shades of Grey
By Caolan Madden. The following is excerpted from Buffy to Batgirl: Essays on Female Power, Evolving Femininity and Gender Roles in Science Fiction and Fantasy © 2019 Edited by Julie M. Still and Zara T. Wilkinson by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc., Box 611, Jefferson NC 28640. www.mcfarlandbooks.com. During […]
Temporal and Spatial Movement – Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics, Edited by Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza
Embrace the Serpent (2015) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Movement, both literal and figurative, is an inherent aspect of cinema: the actors, the camera, and even the filmstrip itself – speeding through a projector – are largely defined by their movements. Perhaps most emblematic of this fundamental quality is […]
Immortality Has Come To This: The Old Guard
“A passable piece of mythology that feigns to be a culturally relevant action flick.” By Elias Savada. A funny thing happened on the way to this movie. It took a second viewing of The Old Guard to figure out it is an ok action flick. On a high-definition 60-inch television, […]
Faces to Remember: They Coulda Been Contenders by Dan Van Neste
Karen Morley, with Osgood Perkins and Paul Muni, in Scarface (1932) A Book Review by Tony Williams. This 2019 book from BearManor Media is a well-compiled series of career surveys and interviews of several screen personalities, some of whom may be familiar to the general viewer, others who have been […]
“My Name is Edna”: Fragmentation, Space and Identity in Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Creswick is a small town of around 3000 people just outside Ballarat, a regional area in the Australian southern state of Victoria. Japanese-Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James has solid professional form working in this part of the country; almost a decade ago she posted on Facebook about […]
Aorta Be in Pictures: The Filmmaking Mystery of Gregory Hatanaka and His Latest, Heartbeat
By Rod Lott. If you have run across Gregory Hatanaka’s name, it most likely was affixed to Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance, his well-intentioned, but ill-advised sequel to the legendarily bad 1991 movie he didn’t make. If it’s true you can’t make a cult movie on purpose, that 2015 disappointment […]
“Found” in Translation: An Interview with Hirokazu Kore-eda on The Truth
When you have good actors, they know what I want. Hirokazu Kore-eda By Ali Moosavi. Japan has had a fine tradition of presenting world-class filmmakers to the world of cinema. These have included Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima and Hayao Miyazaki […]
A New Platform Looks to Revolutionize – and Democratize – How Stories Come to Screens
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 […]