By Gary M. Kramer. Actor Mauricio Ochmann has become a popular leading man in Mexican cinema. He worked steadily in television before achieving some big screen success in hits such as A la mala, a romantic comedy that co-starred Aislinn Derbez, whom he would later marry. Last year, he and […]
Scattershot Disorder(s) in Rene Daalder’s Hysteria
August 27, 2018
By Alex Brannan. A quick search into the work of Rene Daalder yields an interesting array of artistic pieces varied in concept, medium, and scope. The writer, director, and digital effects artist has worked with various musical acts such as Devo and Supertramp. In his early days, he was a frequent […]
The New Delicate Balance: Support the Girls
August 25, 2018
By Janine Gericke. How do we balance work, family, friends, everything in our lives without breaking? This relatable film is a study of working class America with echoes of the #MeToo movement and discrimination in the workplace. Director Andrew Bujalski’s newest film Support the Girls is an entertaining look into […]
Smash Palace, A Wreck in Slow Motion
August 23, 2018
By John Duncan Talbird. New Zealand’s short-lived new wave came quite a bit after most other national cinemas’ new waves. Kick-started by the New Zealand Film Commission with tax breaks for filmmakers, it fell apart just a few years later when those tax loopholes were closed up again. Geoff Murphy (Wild […]
States of Independence: the 8th Transatlantyk Festival, Łódź, Poland (July 2018)
August 23, 2018
By Alex Ramon. “You need an independent spirit if you’re going to go into film or music: so many people will tell you that you can’t do it,” said Diane Warren, on stage at Łódź’s EC1, a former power station now transformed into a vibrant cultural and exhibition centre in […]
Rewarding Curiosity: Skate Kitchen
August 17, 2018
By Janine Gericke. Skate Kitchen is director Crystal Moselle’s first narrative feature following her 2015 documentary The Wolfpack. I knew in the first five minutes that I was going to love this movie, and I absolutely did. Moselle has created a kind of lyrical poem, about New York, about skateboarding, about growing up, […]
Far from Paradise: Dietrich and Von Sternberg in Hollywood (Criterion Collection)
By Tony Williams. A box set containing the Josef Von Sternberg (1894-1969) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) collaboration, even if copyright reasons exclude The Blue Angel (1930), would appear the fulfillment of any film collector’s dreams. This recent release of the Paramount Studio films should have been the most heralded event […]
For and Against the Grand Narrative: The Hollywood War Film
A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. Genre studies, whether treating film genre history as evolutionary or as cycles, always has to fight the charge that genre films are conservative by nature. In Judith Hess Wright’s rather compelling estimation (if limiting), the films always look back to the past to […]
Broken, Yet Living: Memoir of War (La Douleur)
August 13, 2018
By Elizabeth Toohey. Sometimes, on my weirder, darker days, I fantasize about being the architect of a purgatory. There, I would place Mark Zuckerberg – who has lately said he sees no need to take down Holocaust denials posted on Facebook because, you know, “there are things that different people […]
The Cinematic Poetry of Cielo
August 11, 2018
By John Duncan Talbird. Since 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio), time-lapse photography has become a convention, sometimes to the point of cliché. Still, we’re stunned every now and then by its beautiful use as in the opening and closing of flowers to the tune of The Turtles’s “Happy Together” (1967) in […]