By Yun-hua Chen. While Cigaal’s coming of age is marked by the loss of his dreams, the surrounding’s seems to be a brutal and irreversible transformation—one driven by machine-led globalization….” “My whole life I try to make things better, but I keep making mistakes,” says Mamargrade (Axmen Cali Faarax), the […]
Reading Between the Lines: An Interview with Biographer Carl Rollyson
By William Blick. I do not ask myself what information is available about a figure or would they cooperate. Rather, I ask myself, what is in my own experience or what do I think I know about this figure? What qualifies me to write about this person? That is what […]
Building a Mask: Luis Ortega on Kill the Jockey
By M. Sellers Johnson. How do you go through the scenes in life, with what face, with what attitude? It’s really something you can’t choose. You think you can choose but you can’t.” -Luis Ortega From perceptive newcomers like Tomás Gómez Bustillo to internationally regarded directors such as Lucretia Martel […]
Her Own Star – Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. Author Christopher McKittrick makes a persuasive case for celebrating the consummate professional Miles became rather than mourning the icon she never was….” It says a lot about the fickleness of celebrity that an actress who has worked with some of the industry’s biggest […]
Practice Makes Progress: Danny Turkiewicz’s Stealing Pulp Fiction
By Jonathan Monovich. Stealing Pulp Fiction leaves Tarantino’s ambitious narrative structure behind. Instead, Turkiewicz embraces a straightforward story without twists, turns, and time warps.” A so-called “thief” of film history, Quentin Tarantino’s style, predicated on the referential, looks to the past for influence. Tarantino has long prided himself for “stealing.” […]
Post-Colonial Capitalistic Landscape: Selections from Cannes 2025
By Ali Moosavi. The difficult, tumultuous relationship between Celine and Margueritte is at the core of Love Letters, while Félix Dufour-Laperrière delivers Death Does Not Exist.“ The films in the main competition section of Cannes Film Festival are the ones that get all the limelight and media coverage. Cannes however […]
Ben Model, Keeping Silent Movies Alive and Well
By Jeremy Carr. I realized that anything I had ever done related to silent film had just sort of handed itself to me, and I leaned into that….” —Ben Model Ben Model loves silent movies. In case it isn’t obvious by his live performances, online videos and podcasts, and the […]
Touching the Past Generation: A Photographic Memory
By Will Comerford. The blurring of perspectives in this personal documentary reinforces how much mother and daughter are truly occupying similar psychological spaces, despite living in different decades and contexts.” Why do we document? Why paint a hunt on a cave wall, or write down what Jesus or Confucius said? […]
Escaping Stereotypes: Ernesto Dìaz Espinoza’s Diablo
By Ken Hall. A well-made low-budget film with characters that escape one-dimensional stereotyping….” An entertaining vehicle for Scott Adkins, Diablo casts him as Kris Chaney, an ex-convict who comes to Bogotá to rescue young Elisa (Alanna De La Rossa) from cartel boss Vicente (Lucho Velasco). Besides graphic and well-choreographed martial arts […]
The Return (2024): Penelope’s Looming Odyssey and Odysseus’s Trauma Narrative
By David Ryan. Aspires to explore important themes about perception and insight from a trauma-focused narrative but is often undone by its own scrimping of dramatic focus and coherence.” Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024) is a mature but disappointing adaptation of the last few books of Homer’s The Odyssey, centering […]