By Ali Moosavi. Death has been a popular theme for filmmakers to explore almost ever since cinema was invented. Some of the films dealing with mortality have contained some autobiographical elements. In Blue (1993) director Derek Jarman, as he was close to death from AIDS complications, made a cinematic diary […]
A Very English Cinema – Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting to This is England by Matt Glasby
Thomas Puhr
January 14, 2020
A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. Hear the term “Britpop,” and the usual musical suspects come to mind: Blur, Oasis, Suede, and the like. Less obvious is the movement’s cinematic corollary, explored in Matt Glasby’s Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting to This is England (Intellect, 2019). Much like the music with […]
Empathetic and Unblinking: The Painted Bird
Yun-hua Chen
January 14, 2020
By Yun-hua Chen. Seldom can film-viewing be such a devastating experience. Having competed in the category of main competition at the Venice Film Festival and being handpicked by Around the World in 14 Films, the Berlin festival of festivals, it is a film experience of three hours which deeply challenges […]
Marion Davies: Gifted Actress and Impossible Boy
Thomas Gladysz
December 23, 2019
By Thomas Gladysz. I rejoice in this opportunity to record something which today is all but forgotten except for those lucky enough to have seen a few of her pictures: Marion Davies was one of the most delightfully accomplished comediennes in the whole history of the screen. She would have […]
Making and Taking: Overseas
Yun-hua Chen
December 23, 2019
By Yun-hua Chen. After a very personal debut Full of Missing Links (2012) about her journey back to South Korea in search of her father and the experience of separation on a larger scale in the country, the Korea-born and Brussels-based director Yoon Sung-a’s second documentary Overseas, a Belgian-French coproduction, […]
“All Archives Create Futures” – Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
December 19, 2019
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. There’s a moment in Matt Wolf’s documentary Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project where the enormous value of the VHS archival project of the film’s title spirals is captured in its purest essence. The screen is divided into four frames, live television broadcasts recorded off television on 11 […]
To Know Them Doesn’t Mean You Love Them: Bombshell
Elias Savada
December 19, 2019
By Elias Savada. The stars are blondly aligned: Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, as three of the many victims of the “real scandal” at Fox News on which Charles Randolph’s screenplay is based. John Lithgow goes on the broadside as Roger Ailes, the ugly sleaze of a human for […]
Perforation: On Ken Loach’s Factory Humans in Sorry We Missed You
Susana Bessa
December 18, 2019
By Susana Bessa. We could never say it had been the worst week of her life. Because to see it as the worst is to be hopeful on its recovery. It is to say she will, sooner or later, have a better day. And with it, all that weight taken […]
Come One, Come All!: The 67th San Sebastian International Film Festival, 20-28 September 2019
Ali Moosavi
December 17, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. San Sebastian is a beautiful coastal town in the Basque region of Spain. It has one of the oldest film festivals in the world which somehow has not become as prestigious or glamorous as Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. […]
The Best Iranian Films of the Year: A Personal Selection
December 17, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. Among the many Iranian films that I have watched this year, six have stood out for me. If we don’t consider the purely commercial and state-funded films which dominate the screens in Iran, the Achilles heel of most independent Iranian films is their screenplay. If there is one […]