How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions? Did you start this month with enthusiasm and optimism? We seem to enjoy this annual ritual of creating restrictions for ourselves. Some restrictions which seem to complement each other (like exercising and eating less chocolate) in fact serve to double the challenge (burning more calories while [...]
The Cinema City film festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, hosted a panel discussion on the future of film criticism with director Gerald Peary, following the screening of his documentary, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009). The film offers a useful summary of the different roles of the film critic [...]
“I was dealing with human beings, and they’re a pretty fucked up breed.” It probably wouldn’t surprise a lot of people if it were revealed that Ralph Zavadil, the source of the above quotation, weren’t human after all. (He made a name for himself by snorting raw eggs, squirting chocolate syrup on the backs of [...]
When I arrived at my hotel in Berlin to cover this festival, I was surprised to discover a default image of a fireplace quietly crackling away on the flat screen TV on the wall of my room. I wondered what our caveman relatives would have made of a civilization that has come to this point: [...]
“Catfish” is one of those films that will have as many interpretations as it has viewers. The middle-aged hipster-loathing intellectual will see it as nothing more than an outlet for the filmmakers to glorify their modern, pseudo-bohemian cookie-cutter coolness. The bleeding heart will see it as bad form, an exploitative fame-grab at the expense of [...]
The name might already be familiar to you from news reports during the mid-2000s. Pat Tillman was a young American football player who chose to put his career on hold in order to join the US Army. When he was killed on duty in Afghanistan, he was held up as the archetypal all-American hero by [...]
Tabloid is a documentary which uses interviews to investigate a case which was a source of lurid fascination to the British public in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Joyce McKinney was an American beauty queen who came to England in search of her fiancé, Kirk Anderson, who was a Mormon. She believed that his [...]
It takes about three months to make a movie — a Hollywood movie — excluding post and preproduction. Some take longer. Nightmarish production on Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” took 238 days. Stanley Kubrick’s penultimate masterpiece, “Eyes Wide Shut,” took more than 15 months. Nonsense. Jim Wynorski, the most prolific filmmaker you’ve never heard of, [...]
Zeppelin, Hendrix, Dylan, The Grateful Dead, The Rolling Stones. These names, among others, are synonymous with the 1960s counter-culture revolution. Anti-establishment, DIY, independence, innovation, and peace love & rock ‘n’ roll turned a burgeoning, amped-up variation on the blues into a full-fledged institution. So influential were the sounds of the 60s and 70s that their [...]
Death is the great arbiter of a person’s legacy. Michael Jackson’s untimely death this June not only solidified his unequaled stature in the world of pop music but effectively disintegrated the growing negative perception of the enigmatic entertainer. He’ll always have his detractors, who aren’t necessarily in the wrong, but Jackson’s staggering talent and unrivaled [...]
DIFF 2012 Reviews: ‘Cinema Six,’ ‘Compliance,’ ‘Faith, Love and Whiskey’
Things I Don’t Understand (2011)
Jiří Trnka: Animation Retrospective
Lowlights of Cinélatino
Brevity Pays Off
‘A Secret World’ at Cinélatino
‘Future Lasts Forever’ at Sofia
Two Treatments of Italy’s Fascist Past
‘The Leopard’: novel, opera, but above all, film
We’ll always have ‘Casablanca’
