Book Review by Leo Collis. When the subject of French film arises, instant connotations of art cinema, avant-garde productions and typically French subject matter emerge. As argued by Tim Palmer, French cinema is constantly evolving, incredibly varied and often paradoxical, making it one of the most ambitious and culturally important […]
A Behavioural Report on the Greek Crisis
By Celluloid Liberation Front. They already called it the “Greek New Wave”, “Greek Weird Wave” or even “Greek Absurdism”; it more realistically is a bunch of movies coming from the Hellenic peninsula sharing certain thematic traits. It is not the intent of this article to dispute whether Ektoras Lygizos’ film […]
God Bless America (2012)
By Sebastian Clare. Frank has had enough. Divorced and living alone, he fantasises about killing his incessantly loud and obnoxious next-door neighbours and observes, through his television set, the increasing decadence of American culture. In the space of no time, he is fired from his job on a trumped-up harassment […]
Sabotaging Socialist Realism
By Celluloid Liberation Front. As part of its ‘Out of the Past’ sidebar section, the 47th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival has presented a digitally restored copy of Nová Vlna milestone The Firemen’s Ball by Milos Forman. Restored classics often come with an intimidating dose of self-importance and grandeur; Milos […]
Prometheus (2012)
By Jacob Mertens. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) sparked a series of inferior sequels, in no small part because the films failed to grasp what made Alien great: elegant simplicity. Alien crafted a lean build up of tension and fear, and while the narrative allowed a few twists and turns the […]
Queer Bangkok: Twenty-First-Century Markets, Media, and Rights, Peter A. Jackson, ed., (2011)
Book Review by Yvette Lim. We have all heard scathing and cruel remarks about transgendered bodies; they are often cast in tragicomic roles in films that end with these queer bodies marginalized or destroyed, restoring power and order to the heteronormative and the patriarchal. The well-known Thai movies Iron Ladies […]
Project X, or the New Teen Nihilism
By Christopher Sharrett. I have just re-screened on disc Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012), which I saw in a nearby multiplex this past season. I wanted to see it again not because I feared I missed something in the plot (there is hardly any of this, nor characterization, nor any […]
Ill Manors (2012)
By Sebastian Clare. Better known as the musician responsible for the critically-acclaimed UK Chart-topping album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Ben Drew a.k.a. Plan B attempts to bring his creative talent to another medium with an ambitious cinematic debut, Ill Manors. A gritty, unrelenting look at the social underbelly of […]
Hysteria (Tanya Wexler, 2011)
By Carolyn Lake. While comedy is an inevitable feature of a film loosely based on the invention of the electronic vibrator, Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria comes off as surprisingly light despite its fascinating historical subject matter. Hugh Dancy stars as Mortimer Granville, a progressive doctor living in Victorian London during the […]
Prometheus (2012)
By Sebastian Clare. Thirty-three years after his tense, atmospheric sci-fi horror kick-started one of film’s most successful franchises, Ridley Scott returns to the Alien saga with Prometheus, a prequel that seeks to provide some answers, not only to the origins of the series antagonists, the Xenomorphs, but to the ultimate […]