By Nilita Vachani. The film’s visual evidence speaks to the systemic racism that’s at the heart of the country’s self-reckoning today. What insights does the film contain for law enforcement half a century later?” The large white cop holds the small black woman’s neck in a tight chokehold. Four men […]
Werner Schroeter and Underground Film
The Death of Maria Malibran (1972) By Peter Valente. Werner Schroeter has carried the torch for free expression in cinematic art, and shares with many of these underground filmmakers, particularly Jack Smith, a desire for excess and theatricality. But it was a freedom that was won by overcoming obstacles.” Werner […]
Progress and the Forgotten: the Importance of The Saint of Fort Washington (1993)
By Christopher Sharrett. One of the most important films of the 1990s, certainly the best about poverty and the plight of the homeless.” Tim Hunter’s 1993 film The Saint of Fort Washington enjoyed some applause in its day while having a limited release and poor commercial performance. Today, it seems […]
Beyond the Grave – The Living Dead by George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus
Romero on the set of Land of the Dead (2005) By Tony Williams. Recognizing industry obstructions that became increasingly difficult for him to express the full dimensions of his creative talent he decided to work on a novel that, like his original literary work elsewhere, would have been ideal film […]
Everything’s Gone Green: Carnival Dystopia in Michel Franco’s New Order (TIFF 2020)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Franco is aggressively focused on a contemporary moment of social upheaval where a literal class war is rendered even more nightmarish….” Michel Franco’s New Order bursts on the screen with a series of almost breath-takingly bold images. A naked woman covered in green, slime-like paint. A hospital’s […]
Spectacle and the Deranged Landscape – Werner Herzog by Joshua Lund, and Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
John Duncan Talibird
September 9, 2020
Stroszek (1977): “Americans…believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now” –Werner Herzog By John Duncan Talibird. How do you write about Werner […]
“Somebody has to do Something!”: Mainline Protestant Moral Ambiguity in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017)
By Richmond B. Adams. Schrader presents an alarming cultural fragmentation in which American enemies are no longer German Nazis, Soviet bureaucrats, foreign terrorists…. Americans have come to view perhaps even their next door neighbors as adversaries to the death….” Upon the release of Paul’s Schrader’s First Reformed during the early […]
In Search of the “Sonic Novum”: The Sound of Things to Come: An Audible History of the Science Fiction Film by Trace Reddell
Decoder (1984) By Tony Williams. Much of value appears in this book, and the hard read required is often worth it to discover some unique insights.” Emerging from the prestigious University of Minnesota Press, The Sound of Things to Come is a weighty tome in more than one sense. As […]
A Comfortable Troublemaker – Michael Haneke: Interviews, edited by Roy Grundmann, Fatima Naqvi, and Colin Root
Code Unknown (2000) I try to rouse the viewer from his status as a victim in order to give him a more flexible position in relation to the film.” By Jeremy Carr. There’s a penetrating coldness that commonly characterizes the films of Michael Haneke. Rightly or wrongly, similar notions of […]
Siberia and the Ascension of Abel Ferrara
Ferrara is determinedly consistent in his devotion to his core visions, and as hungry as ever to discover new ways to express them.” By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. At some point over the last decade, my initially half-jokingly insistence that Abel Ferrara had become the thinking person’s Lars Von Trier became less […]