By Moira Sullivan. The Créteil Films de Femmes festival is a high quality panorama of the images of international women in cinema. A question for some may be: is a women’s film festival outdated today? If you attend the festival you will know that it exists for the same reason […]
Trollhunter (2010)
By Jacob Mertens. The towering behemoth of a forest troll looms over the cameraman, its three heads sniffing the air violently, a shaggy tail swishing through the brush. The scene is punctuated by percussive shifts between night vision and standard, as the awkward bulk of the troll evaporates in darkness […]
Bridesmaids (2011)
By Jacob Mertens. There’s a lot at play with the new female-driven comedy Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig. The chaos of marriage and weddings, and the fluctuating dynamic of long sustained friendship is all laid bare, while a balance is constantly maintained between frivolous humor and genuine emotion. More importantly, […]
Navigating Both Worlds: An Interview with Maryam Keshavarz on Circumstance
By Matthew Sorrento. While adapting Alicia Erian’s novel Towelhead for the big screen, Alan Ball considered using the title Nothing is Private. While the idea now sounds like padding, the alternate title would have suited the film well. The lead role, the thirteen-year-old Arab-American Jasira, comes of age sexually under […]
Billboards for Geeks
By Jamie Isbell. How has projection mapping made such an impact on audiences? And, with increasing numbers of brands adopting the advertising method, is it a bright future for the digital delight? Or an already exhausted gimmick destined for a dusty shelf? In plumes of digital fabric the angular relics […]
Istanbul Film Festival Turns 30
By N. Buket Cengiz. The most important event of the year for the cinephiles of Istanbul, the International Istanbul Film Festival, enjoyed its thirtieth birthday this year, featuring two hundred and thirty one films in seven venues and attracting a total of one hundred and fifty thousand viewers. The festival […]
Bin Laden leaves Suddenly
By Rajko Radovic. Bin Laden lies at the bottom of the ocean, yet the jungle of shadowy networks and lethal plots he had left behind is still breathing with the night. His scarred body sleeping with fish is shrouded in mafia style mystery. There is no doubt now he is […]
Revisiting Citizen Ruth
By Lesley Brill. Alexander Payne’s 1996 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, is generally remembered as an incongruously comic look at the struggle between opponents of legal abortion and its defenders in the United States. That’s a topic of perennial importance in American politics, and it’s especially relevant now with the […]
The White Ribbon
By Kierran Horner. The White Ribbon (2009) is about guilt. It is another film by Michael Haneke about guilt. But it would be reductive to suggest that The White Ribbon was something as simple as a macrocosmic, German Hidden (Caché, 2005); an analysis of the guilt felt by a nation […]
Alain Resnais: Wild Grass (2009)
By Kierran Horner. The opening sequence of Resnais’ latest film is an abstract one; a non-narrative medium-shot of a tower in a field, disused one assumes, into which the camera passes, through a blackened doorway. From this blackout, an edit posits us in close-up above a crack in a road […]