Can I Hit It? Highlights of the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival
“Once you have a hammer, doesn’t everything look like a nail? In Hong Sang-soo’s films, everyone’s a nail.” * * * The most anticipated films on the festival circuit this[…]
Category: Festivals & Awards
Familiar Faces: Some Notes on the 2017 SxSW Film Festival
Though moving a bit more stiffly in Lucky, Harry Dean is still moving, and that, the film says, is a beautiful thing. * * * SxSW wrapped up this past[…]
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
Making Waves: Wavelengths at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 8-18, 2016)
With so many films being made – many of which will never receive wide distribution – how do you navigate the glut of movies at a whopper like Toronto? *[…]
Blood’s Up: The 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival
But even though Jesse (Elle Fanning) is “everything” right now, what she has is fragile: the aura of enchantment so prized by fashion is easily lost. Once she stops looking[…]
Pretend We’re Dead: The 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival (July 30-Aug. 16)
How radically mundane can things get? * * * Doing Nothing, Really Well At her workshops in New York, the renowned screenwriter Yvette Biro asks students to come up with[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
Thrilling and Horrifying: Bellocchio and De Palma at the Venice Film Festival 2015 (with Detours to Childhood of a Leader and Beasts of No Nation)
From the start of Blood of My Blood, we can sense the power that is contained within the mysterious malleability of light. Within a scene, some actions are clearly etched[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Better Endings: QDoc: Portland’s Ninth Queer Documentary Film Festival (May 14-17, 2015)
“It’s time to give her story a better ending,” says Jane Anderson in her documentary Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson, speaking of her great[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Festivals & Awards
Red Carpets and Radicals: The Shadow of Reality at the Fifth Odessa International Film Festival (July 11-19, 2014)
The Fifth Odessa International Film Festival was destined to be unlike its previous editions. Only two months previously, Odessa suffered an unprecedented peak in civil violence with the death of[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
Like You Know It All: The Power of Godard and Breillat at the 63rd Melbourne International Film Festival (July 31-August 17, 2014)
“As directors such as Godard, Herzog, and Wenders take on 3D, we sense that for this generation of the avant-garde, the goal is no longer to test the audience’s reliance[…]
A Family Affair: Brooklyn’s BAMcinemaFest (June 18-29, 2014)
“Based on the sample of crowdfunded films at BAM, “public” funding in a country where public, government funding for arts is rapidly diminishing and has long since paled in comparison[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Heroes (Mostly) and Villains: Portland’s QDoc Queer Documentary Festival, May 15-18
Portland, Oregon’s notoriety of late has come mainly from being satirized as over-the-top PC (Portlandia), its status as a foodie and craft beer paradise, a haven for runaway teens and activists,[…]
The Way Things Look: Farewell to Alain Resnais at the Berlinale 2014 (Feb. 6-16)
The author, who served on the critics’ jury at the festival, profiles the late Alain Resnais and his award-winning final film, along with several works by other directors. This Berlinale[…]
Marcel Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International Documentary Festival 2013 (Nov. 12-23, 2013)
“With Ophuls too we need to be on our guard, given the idiosyncratic way he shapes material. There is often a tricky leakage of voice-over between successive scenes: at one[…]
French Fusions: Cinemania Festival, Montréal, 2013
“No-one can get over the paradox of a sphinx head on top of a chic model’s body: the sense of this slight figure propping up a magnificent mask.” Cinemania has[…]
Where Do We Go from Here? The 54th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Nov. 1-10, 2013)
Cinema has a way of capturing the unease of life, those wearying sharp fragments and provocations of everyday experience that reveal a greater truth. At the 54th Thessaloniki International Film[…]
Bridging the Popular/Arthouse Divide: The Kinotavr Film Festival (2013)
“This year’s Kinotavr didn’t suggest a Russian film industry in meltdown even though some of the expected highlights were to prove deeply disappointing. On the other hand, there were pleasant[…]
Tip Tap: Polanski and Ophüls at the Cannes Film Festival 2013
“For some reason, works built on the masterpiece scale command instant respect, even if their structure is unsound . . . Although [The Great Beauty] looks and sounds like an epic, there is no definition in the detail — the film has been put together with hammer and tongs.”
Festivals & Awards · Uncategorized
No Means: The International Istanbul Film Festival 2013
“At a protest against the demolition of the historic Emek theatre, Nil was beaten and kicked by police offers. My fellow FIPRESCI juror, the excellent critic Berke Göl, was grabbed by the throat, punched, and arrested. Hundreds of other protestors — largely film critics, actors, and directors including festival guest Costa-Gavras — were subject to police force.”
“What Price, Hollywood?” Workers World Party Goes to the 85th Annual Academy Awards
“Moorehead cannot pause to celebrate performances of Adele and the fabulous Shirley Bassey because they contradict her depiction of the Oscars as an unabated mudslide of anti-woman vulgarity; she does not discuss the implications of Michelle Obama’s appearance, either. Why?”
Waving the Algerian Flag: The 50th Anniversary Algerian Sidebar at the 2012 Abu Dhabi Film Festival
“Probably the only film that dwarfs the spectacle of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Chronicle also challenges that British hero’s often chilly pathology with its own surge of powerfully accruing life-and-death incidents in the survival struggles of farmer Ahmed.”
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