By Yun-hua Chen. Premiering at the Berlinale Generation 2018, Cobain is a film about the eponymous hero, a 15-year-old boy in Rotterdam played by the first-time actor Bas Keizer. As his drug addict and expectant mother Mia is unable to take care of him, Cobain is sent to a foster […]
Max Winkler’s Flower Sour
By Elias Savada. I didn’t like Max Winkler’s first feature, the dreary comedy Ceremony (2011), a quirky tic of a wedding crasher film. My impression of his directorial abilities hasn’t changed much in Flower, a jaded Valley Girl vigilante drama that screams “watch my petals wilt” as shell-shocked patrons wander […]
Andy Goldsworthy’s Landscape Art: Leaning Into the Wind
March 26, 2018
By John Duncan Talbird. In the opening of the new documentary, Leaning Into the Wind, artist Andy Goldsworthy tours a small home in the mountains in Brazil. To Western eyes, the dwelling might seem pre-modern, even decrepit. But to Goldsworthy, all he sees is the handcraft of the residence, the sturdy […]
Role-Playing Writ Small: I Kill Giants
March 23, 2018
By Elias Savada. Children dealing with their fears – although not those anxieties normally associated with horror genre tropes like The Dark, Loud Noises, and such – play a central role in I Kill Giants, which melds one Eastern Long Island, New York, family’s enigmatic trauma with monstrous, noxious beasts that […]
Comedy Killing Satire: The Death of Stalin
March 20, 2018
By Jake Rutkowski. The process of interpersonal grievances and small-scale ironies rippling out into matters of national security is at this point a calling card for celebrated Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci (he of Alan Partridge, The Thick of It / In the Loop, and Veep fame). It’s fair to say that […]
Redemption Post-Aparthied: Roland Joffé on The Forgiven
By Tom Ue. Produced, directed, and co-written by Roland Joffé, The Forgiven is an adaptation of Michael Ashton’s play The Archbishop and the Antichrist. The film stars Academy Award-winner Forest Whitaker as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who, in his work as President of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in post-apartheid South […]
Hard Truths: An Interview with Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher on Tinta Bruta
March 15, 2018
By Yun-hua Chen. Shot in the southern Brazilian city Porto Alegre and directed by the duo Filipe Matzembacher and Mario Reolon, Tinta Bruta is a gentle portrait about Pedro, a young man who earns his living by performing on gay-oriented streaming platforms, and a city from which young people depart in […]
Family Values and Civic Duties: Fassbinder’s Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day
March 14, 2018
By Jeremy Carr. Rainer Werner Fassbinder was particularly adept at transitioning between the cinema and television (and theater, for that matter), starting the crossover just a few films in to his prolific directorial career, with Das Kaffeehaus, a TV movie released in 1970. In 1972, already with a mind-boggling 14 titles […]
Unlovely Spectacle: D.A. Miller on Call Me By Your Name
By David Greven. An exchange I had with an older, straight, white academic in Film Studies serves as an instructive example of a particular phenomenon that I will call the Miller Effect. Hearing me express admiration for Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, which I consider a masterpiece, he stared […]
Embedded in Reality: A Conversation with Raoul Peck on Young Karl Marx
By John Duncan Talbird. When Raoul Peck was nominated for an Oscar last year for his documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, to many he seemed to have appeared from out of nowhere. But his first feature film, the New York City immigrant drama, Haitian Corner (1987), […]