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 […]
Into the…Shed
December 17, 2019
By Ali Moosavi. The box office success of films such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, etc. and their endless sequels has popularized that dreaded word “franchise” in Hollywood. These films have also defined the slasher movie genre. A common denominator in all these films is the […]
“When There Are No Good Answers”: Barbara Kopple’s Desert One (2019)
Kate Hearst
December 16, 2019
By Kate Hearst. At the New York premiere of Desert One at the DOC/NYC film festival, Barbara Kopple recounted how the History Channel provided her with a list of topics to choose for their “History 100” project. That Kopple decided to make a documentary about the unsuccessful 1980 rescue operation […]
Richard Jewell and the Damn Yankees
Christopher Sharrett
December 16, 2019
By Christopher Sharrett. I have had sympathetic interest in the work of Clint Eastwood over the years, but such interest has been hard to sustain with antics like his talking to an empty chair – as a mock of Obama – during the 2012 Republican National Convention. In retrospect, it […]
A Sense of Loss: Dónal Foreman’s The Image You Missed
James Slaymaker
December 16, 2019
By James Slaymaker. Jean-Luc Godard once explained that he pioneered his late-period, archival style after realizing that “in a striking manner, film was able to recount its own history in a way quite different from the other arts. And in montage alone, there was a story, or attempts at stories, […]