By Jonathan Monovich. Some people only want to see what they expect to see, but I’m not that kind of person. Josef Von Sternberg was once told his movie didn’t seem very realistic, and he responded, ‘Of course not, it’s much better than reality.’” –Julian Schnabel In the truest sense […]
A Touch of the Poetry: Orson Welles and Badge of Evil
By James Morrison. Every admirer of Welles – that is, every lover of cinema – will find endless fascination in perusing the point of origin of one of his greatest films.” Touch of Evil (1958) starts with the most famous shot in Orson Welles’s work and one of the most […]
“Between Algeria and France There’s Still a Wound”: François Ozon on Adapting Camus’s The Stranger
By Alex Ramon. That’s why it’s a masterpiece – it escapes one interpretation. So I decided to accept the fact that this is my interpretation of the novel and hoped that it would touch other people too. Compared to other adaptations I’ve made of more ‘minor’ or lesser known works, […]
Alex Cox’s Dead Souls to Close SF IndieFest
January 22, 2026
Cox’s new revisionist Western offers commentary on contemporary immigration policy and violence.” Alex Cox will appear at SF IndieFest at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater for the closing night screening of his new film, Dead Souls. His adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s novel resituates the story as a Western, placing the action […]
Into the Ill-Fated Future: from Build My Gallows High to Out of the Past
By Jeremy Carr. If there is a lesson to be learned from noir stories, be they in print or filmed, it is that the past never stays in the past for long, and the inevitably ill-fated future closes in faster than expected. This formula has been the underlying core of […]
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 […]
Boo-Who-dunit – Kenneth Branagh Sinks A Haunting in Venice
By Elias Savada. Not the charm you might be hoping for, unless you’re a fan of endless rain, too many jump scares, unsettling camera angles, ragged hand-held camerawork, onerous close-ups, and a score drowning in dreary woodwinds and screechy violins.” Those actor-ensemble, murder mystery set pieces you’ve experienced in movie […]
Adaptation, and the “Elite Community” of Filmmaking: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
By Ali Moosavi. As an overall trend I’m thinking the world is in a very precarious situation at the moment and why is it that the majority of films at this major film festival are about this elite community of film makers and artists and conductors and intellectuals? That did […]
“Anything but this project, I would have been wary”: An Interview with Daniel Kraus on George A. Romero and Writing The Living Dead
By Tony Williams. I had no intention of sending off Romero in anything less than grand style.” As discussed in my review essay, novelist Daniel Kraus began conceiving The Living Dead (New York: Tor Books, 2020) with Romero at a time when creative frustration with the film industry began to […]
When Man Becomes Animal: Jimmy Henderson’s The Prey
By Thomas Puhr. Henderson version of Connell’s ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ quickly ditches visual fluidity once the hunt begins and instead settles for a series of repetitive shootouts and sequences of aimless wandering” With its brisk pacing, memorable characters (Count Zaroff is a blueprint for countless villains), and tailored-for-classroom-discussion themes […]