By Elias Savada. There have been plenty of movies that have skewered the sunbaked air of Los Angeles and the strange people who breathe it – Mick Jackson’s L.A. Story and Robert Altman’s The Player remain two of my favorites – but folks, if you find somewhere showing writer-director Alex Goldberg’s Closure following its world […]
The Boy Who Fell To Earth: The Astronaut’s Bodies (Die Körper der Astronauten)
By Elias Savada. Russian-born and German-trained Alisa Berger shows off her experimental and artistic tendencies in The Astronaut’s Bodies, a graduation project for the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her first feature is a meditative family drama that extends its light story line (also by Berger) into juxtaposed threads […]
Social Critique, in Truth and Fiction: 2018 Oscar Nominated Live Action and Documentary Shorts
February 8, 2018
By Elias Savada. With less than a month before we find out how many Academy Awards The Shape of Water will actually win, the short list of the shortest films are usually the last entries that most people, even critics, will catch before game night: Sunday, March 4th. Between those 15 […]
Big Dreams and Odd Dwellings: 2018 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
February 7, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. The best short films hook viewers, carry them through the story, and deliver a surprising finish. Animation is best when it is used to depict things that cannot quite happen in real life – especially when animation is used to do this in inventive ways. The […]
All That Shapes a Star – Grace Kelly: Hollywood Dream Girl by Jay Jorgensen and Manoah Bowman
A Book Review by Anthony Uzarowski. In the 1950s female movie stars were expected to be more than human. For a price of a cinema ticket one could sit in the dark, gazing at the world’s most beautiful people. In some cases, viewers might even expect to witness the divine, for some […]
Disorder in the Court: The Insult
February 2, 2018
By Elias Savada. When 46-year-old automobile mechanic Tony George Hanna (a piercing-eyed Adel Karam) is first seen in The Insult, he’s at an open air rally supporting the country’s right wing, anti-refugee political faction. At home, a photo of his hero hovers over the crib of his soon-to-be-born daughter, despite pleas […]
Where Does the Shredding End? – Ripping England: Postwar British Satire from Ealing to the Goons by Roger Rawlings
A Book Review by Tony Williams. Ripping England is the latest of two recent studies by American academics devoted to aspects of British Cinema. Although the day is long gone when certain snotty English academics could remark that Americans should not write about British cinema gaining the justified response, “Then […]
On National Consciousness – Hungarian Film 1929-1947: National Identity, Anti-Semitism, and Popular Cinema by Gabor Gergely
January 31, 2018
A Book Review by Robert Buckeye. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabainares (1963), a soldier at a cinema for the first time sees a woman on the screen, leaves his seat to meet her, and walks into the screen. What he sees he believes to be real, but he does not understand […]
The Post: Nostalgia for Half-Truth
By Christopher Sharrett. I hope that Steven Spielberg’s The Post ignites more interest in the standard media, at a time when blogs and rightist websites, and the repugnant Fox News, are lauded by the Trump Administration and its friends as the only outlets not involved in “fake news.” But that’s […]
Seasonal Pageantry from Philadelphia: Christmas Dreams
January 25, 2018
By Elias Savada. Christmas comes but once a year, but folks who like the holiday’s sweet joy and heartfelt message might take a look at Christmas Dreams anytime they’re down and weary. It’s a surprisingly simple spiritual picker-upper that takes The Little Drummer Boy and The Nutcracker Princess, two public domain […]