By Christopher Sharrett. I have no reservations about using a central, foundational handbook serving women as the subtitle to this piece (in part because my wife was co-author of the original edition), since the topic of Charles Dosunmu’s excellent film is women made peripheral and in transit in the current […]
De Palma’s Scarface at 35: a TriBeCa Panel
April 24, 2018
By Gary M. Kramer. Brian DePalma’s 1983 remake of Howard Hawks’ Scarface, with a script by Oliver Stone, had a special 35th anniversary screening at the TriBeCa film festival with DePalma, Pacino, and costars Michelle Pfeiffer and Steven Bauer in attendance. The film received raucous applause when it started and […]
Genius in Collaboration: The Outer Limits, Season One from Kino Lorber
By Tony Williams. I saw my first episode of The Outer Limits on a regional independent television station in the mid-60s. Opening with the evocative credit sequence “There is nothing wrong with your television set. We will control everything…” the off-screen voice of Vic Perrin promised to take us all […]
The Endless: Who’s Crazy Now?
April 21, 2018
By Elias Savada. I’ve been a fan of horror maestros Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ever since catching their 2012 feature debut Resolution at that year’s SpookyFest in Washington DC. Last year that festival (following the lead of the Tribeca Film Festival, where the filmmakers are deservedly well appreciated) also sported […]
A Genre Reclaimed: Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge
April 18, 2018
By Alex Brannan. There is a critical stigma to the small subset of films that comprise the rape-revenge genre – or, at the very least, a healthy hesitation. In 1980, Roger Ebert famously took down Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave, calling it “a vile bag of garbage … without […]
A Little Bold, and a Little Lighter: Sharon Badal on 2018 Tribeca Shorts
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival, unspooling April 18-29, features 10 competitive shorts programs curated by the masterful Sharon Badal. (An ESPN program of four sports shorts also screening at the fest is outsourced and out of festival competition.) The programs this year feature documentary, animated, […]
An Archive of Indoctrination: Hitler’s Hollywood
April 16, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Even if there wasn’t a compelling, underlying thesis to Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945, this 2017 film by Rüdiger Suchsland would still be a valuable, fascinating record. For the sheer breadth of assembled material, an overwhelming array of Third Reich-era film clips from […]
Beauty and the Dogs: Women’s Revolution in Tunisian Cinema
By Matthew Fullerton. As Hollywood grapples with diversity issues, it is interesting to note how Tunisia, an emergent democracy since its 2011 revolution, has witnessed women filmmakers moving into the forefront of a traditionally male-dominated film industry. Emboldened perhaps by the 2014 Constitution guaranteeing freedom of opinion, thought, and expression, […]
Losing Touch: Ready Player One
April 11, 2018
By Dean Goldberg. While I’ll admit that Pong was the last video game I had any interest in and more recently got sea sick when a colleague slipped goggles on my head for a virtual world tour, I was still pretty excited when asked to review Steven Spielberg’s new film, Ready […]
Unfertile Perspectives – A Green and Pagan Land: Myth, Magic and Landscape in British Film and Television by David Huckvale
A Book Review by Tony Williams. According to an old saying about not judging a book by its cover, the same can apply both to the image on the cover as well as the subtitle. This latest study by David Huckvale, A Green and Pagan Land: Myth, Magic and Landscape […]