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 […]
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 […]