Interview

By Michael T. Toole. For the last two weekends of March in Oakland’s Paramount Theater, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) presented Abel Gance’s, thrilling, sweeping epic, Napoléon (1927). This showcase had the air of a once in your lifetime happening, and for many of us that very well […]

By Yusef Sayed. A highly prolific filmmaker who has spearheaded the active and visible presence of Filipino artists at film festivals around the world in recent years, Khavn De La Cruz is tough to pin down. With countless films to his name, including Squatterpunk (2007), Ultimo: Different Ways of Killing […]

By Gary M. Kramer. Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odysseyis a fascinating—and fantastic—documentary that traces more than 100 years of cinema in 900 minutes. Featuring clips from 1,000 films, Cousins hopscotches from cinema’s early start in New Jersey and France and visits Asia, Africa, and South America while […]

By Michael T. Toole. Noir has many sides, aside from the stunning stylistic things we look for in the films (the imposing verticality of a cityscape, rain soaked streets, darkly lit corridors) there are the more intrinsic elements, like lovers’ betrayal and protecting ill-fated choices, that give it its narrative […]

By Parviz Jahed. Clyde Jeavons is the programmer of the London Film Festival’s ‘Treasures from the Archive’ section. He was the former curator of the National Film and Television Archive and the British Film Institute. He’s been retired for some years, but he now annually programs the restored films at […]

The New Tenants won the Academy Award for best live action short film in 2010. Amy R. Handler has talked to the men behind the movie. Who hasn’t had a day where ‘everything breaks down in a bucket of hell?’ We’ve all had such an experience – chances are, several […]

By Santiago Rubín de Celis. The films by Alain Cavalier (born in Vendôme, France, in 1931) are the result of a process of slow, soft erosion. For more than fifty years – from his Nouvelle Vague-style short film Un Américain (‘An American’, 1958) to his 2009 feature, Irène, which is […]

At the inaugural launch of the UK’s recurring Arabic Film Festival, Omar Kholeif, the festival’s director caught up with the Egyptian film director, Khaled El Hagar, after a retrospective screening of El Hagar’s first feature film, Little Dreams (Ahlam Saghira, 1993). Here is some of what Khaled had to say: […]

By Deirdre O’Neill. Emily James is an independent documentary filmmaker and producer who has worked in both television and film and whose work deals with contemporary political issues. Her latest film Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws (released in the UK in July 2011) is both an intervention […]

By Matthew Sorrento. In the early 1930s, just after the birth of sound in movies, an older medium was running through the newer one. Newspaper movies, or reporter characters onscreen, regularly appeared to remind viewers that events are only as vital as how they are covered. The great newspaper films […]