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: Movies
Watch It Again! Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s one-word titles have never been so instructive. Psycho is the feeling of being preyed on by your self, as by one of Norman’s stuffed birds. It is the primal[…]
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[…]
The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
Today – January 20 – is David Lynch’s birthday (he’s 71). To honor one of the true originals of le cinema moderne – and to remind ourselves of the importance[…]
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? *[…]
Mia of the Spirits: Woody Allen’s Alice (1990)
Alice isn’t all high-concept reverie and mystical melancholy. After a series of self-consciously arthouse films and sombre homages – and bookended between Another Woman and Crimes and Misdemeanours on the[…]
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[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Two from Flicker Alley: Isn’t Life Wonderful (Griffith, 1924) and Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies, 1915-16
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
Take What You Have Gathered from Coincidence: D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967)
“BOB: Well, you always know who you are. I just don’t know who I’m gonna become.” – Sam Shepard. True Dylan: A One-Act Play as It Really Happened One Afternoon in[…]
Mexican Roadtrips: Güeros, Sicaros, and the Search for Mexico
Güeros is the story of a search without an object, and it offers an approach to making political art that dwells not in the illusion of authenticity, but in the[…]
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[…]
Sh! The Horror! 13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience
Editor’s note: We’re posting Erich “Mr. Acidemic” Kuersten’s viewing guide a couple of days before Halloween to give our readers a chance to locate these “cool and strange” suggestions spanning cinema’s[…]
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[…]
Books · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray
“Secret Energy and Vital Intelligence”: On Karel Reisz’s Adaptation of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)
What’s remarkable, in both book and film, is how the metafictional elements do not detract from our emotional investment in the straightforward fiction. Where Fowles’ interjected commentary and authorial intrusions form[…]
Recent DVD and Blu-ray Releases from Flicker Alley: The House of Mystery, Dziga Vertov, Joan the Woman, The Marriage Circle
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Sexual Confusion, the Attractions of Moral Chaos, and the Contrarieties of Personality: Navigating the Vagaries of Fellini Satyricon (1969)
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
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[…]
Plissken on Parade: Escape from New York (1981) Comes to Blu-ray
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of Moments”: On Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (2015)
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Dreams and Visions: Ingmar Bergman’s Kvinnodröm (Dreams) (1955)
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
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