Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

Working for the Police, Working for the City, or Selling Drugs: Stanley Corkin’s Connecting The Wire »

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. David Simon’s television series The Wire ran on HBO from 2002-2008, five seasons of a prestige show that, in the less…

The Indian Film Critics Have Done It Again!: Reading Gender in Ki & Ka Through the Cinematic Lens of R. Balki »

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. The Indian film critics have done it again! As Glover and Kaplan state in their book Genders, the term “gender” itself is rather slippery. Such complicated…

The Year of the Kneale Olympics – Into the Unknown: the Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray and We Are the Martians edited by Neil Snowdon »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of metaphorical prison walls. Inferior and derivative…

Facts are Not Stupid Things: Lessons from The Reagan Show »

By Heather Hendershot. One week after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here reached the #9 position in book sales on Amazon. Brave New World held the #15 slot.…

Still More to the Story: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! by Scott Allen Nollen and Paul Muni by Michael B. Druxman »

A Book Review Essay by Matthew Sorrento. It may be tempting to recommend Scarface (1932) or Little Caesar (1930) as a first viewing to newcomers of pre-Code. However,…

Master of Italian Gothic – Riccardo Freda: The Life and Works of a Born Filmmaker by Roberto Curti »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. Many decades ago I heard a comment made by a respected scholar, and affirmed by a graduate student whom he later…

When Tay Garnett Met Frankie and Johnnie: Her Man (1930) »

by John Andrew Gallagher. Tay Garnett and and writer Howard Higgin spent the months of February and March, 1930 on Catalina Island writing Her Man, sharing a house…

The Roots of Social Change: Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs on Criterion »

By Christopher Weedman. The Criterion Collection deserves to be commended for their continued efforts to bring greater attention to the underappreciated films of director Ermanno Olmi. It is…

The Function of Film Criticism at Any Time »

By Christopher Sharrett. Readers will note that my title derives from essays and certain phrases by Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence, Robin…

All God’s Children (Toti copiii domnului, 2012)

A Forgotten Country’s Forgotten Cinema: Searching for Hope in Post-Soviet Moldovan Cinema »

By Brandon Konecny. It has been suggested, sometimes by Moldovan film professionals themselves, that cinema does not currently exist in the Republic of Moldova, Europe’s poorest and perhaps…

Kentucky Fried Chicken in the Moonlight »

By Orville Lloyd Douglas. Black people are still mentally enslaved; even in the 21st century there is a psychic need by some Black artists to seek white approval…

Festival Reports

A Tool for Travelling: Transatlantyk Festival, Łódź (14 – 21 July 2017) »

The Beksińskis: A Sound and Picture Album

By Alex Ramon. Now in its seventh year, Poland’s Transatlantyk Festival remains a spearheading festival in a country that, despite its current volatile political climate, doesn’t yet lack for dynamic, high-profile cultural events:…

By Robert Buckeye. Art Film Fest in Košice, Slovakia (16-24 June) provided greater opportunities for those who seek out film however they can by screening films that were seen recently and awarded at…

By Yun-hua Chen. Viennale and Thessaloniki Film Festival are two of the finest film festivals in Europe. Viennale curates the best arthouse films of the year from all major film festivals and is…

By Yun-hua Chen. Doku.Arts Essaybox and Around The World in 14 Films are embellishing Berlin’s autumn cinemascape for sure, each in its own way. The former prides itself on the curation of documentaries…

By Gary M. Kramer. The short documentary films at this year’s AFI DOCS ranged from the political to the personal. The political shorts were part of the festival’s “World Views” program. One of…

By Gary M. Kramer. Ecuadorian cinema has been booming in recent years, and the 3rd Ecuadorian Film Festival in New York, June 9-17, showcases films by some of the most intriguing directors from…

By Ali Moosavi. In A Gentle Creature, by the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa which played at the Cannes Official Competition, a woman in a Russian village receives a parcel, which she had sent to…

By N. Buket Cengiz. No matter how much face Turkey loses on the international stage particularly with its friction with European countries, Istanbul Film Festival is a phenomenon in Turkey that has always…

Interview

Breaking All Stereotypes: An Interview with Egyptian Director Mohamed Diab at Cannes »

By Neila Driss. The Egyptian screenwriter and director Mohamed Diab is a bold filmmaker, unafraid of tackling subjects that…

By Martin Kudláč. Marko Zaror, Chilean-born martial artist known from the films of Robert Rodriguez, stars as the nemesis, Rastingac, to…

By Jeremy Carr. Before ever beginning his debut feature film, director Mathieu Ratthe had proven himself adept at two critical…

By Gary M. Kramer The lovingly made documentary Saving Brinton, which received its World Premiere at the recent AFI…

By Jake Rutkowski. Anxiety over parenthood has long been fertile ground for the horror film tradition. Frankenstein (1931), one of…

By Constantine Frangos. When renowned cartoonist, author, and comics theorist Scott McCloud first suggested the idea of creating a…

By Matthew Fullerton. Night School, which premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, is the latest documentary from Emmy…

By Tom Ue. Actor, writer, and filmmaker James Fanizza graduated from York University before making his television debut in a commercial…

By Melissa Webb. In David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), a parasite gets loose in an apartment complex and begins infecting the…

By Irv Slifkin. Star Trek fans thought they knew Susan Oliver, as “Vina” the green alien woman in the abandoned…

By John Duncan Talbird. In 2002, director Steven Shainberg won a special jury prize at the Sundance film festival for…

Tony Williams: Yes, it is a neglected tradition. Robwert Singer of CUNY is currently writing a book on ZOLA AND FILM....
John Talbird: Thanks for the comments, Tony. I didn’t know about Zola’s influence on Mosley, but you can...
Tony Williams: A really fascinating review, J.D. I like the way you bring Zola into the picture since I believe his...
Saidin Salkic: “Love”, to quote myself from the first comment, still stands as my most important one. I...
Truck Driver 39: I think the critic here has the right to express whatever they like and the review was written with...

Review

Ham on Die, with a Side of Cupcakes and Beer: The Dismembered »

By Elias Savada. Taking a film out of distribution purgatory, Garagehouse Pictures is the final link in a rescue involving an obscure 1962 horror comedy relic called The Dismembered, now…

20 Rms, Expanding Views: Dave Made a Maze »

By Elias Savada. Is there any way to regain whatever amount of dignity an actor has gained in his career after he’s played a penis? Funny guy Nick Thune, who played…

Rebelling in the Right Direction: Midnight Movie Monographs’ Martin by Jez Winship and Theatre of Blood by John Llewellyn Probert »

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Before the successful re-launching of We Are the Martians, editor Neil Snowdon initiated a new series by the same company PS Publishing, namely Midnight…

As Offbeat As Fancher: Escapes »

By Jeremy Carr. Escapes, a new documentary from director Michael Almereyda and executive producer Wes Anderson, begins with Philip K. Dick’s ruminations on “counterfeit worlds…Semi-real worlds as well as deranged private…

EATING RAOUL, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, 1982, TM & Copyright (c) 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All ri

From Brooklyn, with Camp – Paul Bartel: The Life and Films by Stephen B. Armstrong »

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Say the name and the image of an overweight, balding man with a neatly trimmed beard and unctuous demeanor comes to mind. In productions…

Gazpacho with A Shot of Estrogen: Almodovar’s Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown »

By Kate Hearst. As statistics continue to demonstrate the persistent imbalance of women’s representation on screen,[1] Pedro Almodovar’s Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), beautifully restored by…

The Dark Tower: The Mighty King Has Fallen »

By Elias Savada. The phrase “lump of coal” comes to mind after watching The Dark Tower, a lavish and most definitely lackluster CliffsNotes abridgment of a CliffsNotes adaptation of the Stephen…

After Love: Verity and Banality »

By Jeremy Carr. While watching After Love, a 2016 film about a Brussels couple in the midst of an emotionally evolving but physically inert separation, it’s often tempting to pick a…

On the Road to Nirvana: Jodorowsky’s Endless Poetry »

By Elias Savada. “A naked virgin will illuminate your path with a blazing butterfly.” Yes, just the kind of fertile, fantastic utterance you would expect to hear in any luxuriant, eccentric…

Bisarjan: Kaushik Ganguly on Unrequited Love »

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. On the banks of the Padma lives Padma Halder, named after one of the bigger rivers flowing between the two countries of Bangladesh and India, divided by…

Two California Raisins Walk Into a Sitcom: Landline »

By Elias Savada. Three years ago, filmmaker Gillian Robespierre arrived at the Sundance Film Festival with her first feature, Obvious Child, a small, smart comedy-drama about pregnancy and abortion. It was…

Coppola’s Dazzling Teenage Dream: Rumble Fish (Criterion Collection) »

By Jeremy Carr. Two credits stand out on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film Rumble Fish. One is Stewart Copeland, then drummer for The Police, who provided the picture’s hypnotic, dissonant rock-jazz…

Laid to Rest: Frederic Mermoud’s Moka »

By Devapriya Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Frederic Mermoud’s French-thriller Moka (2016) centers on a grieving woman who is on the hunt for the killers of her young son, fatally wounded in…

Beatriz at Dinner: Necessary Cinema »

By Christopher Sharrett. There are certainly films more perceptive about class and race than Beatriz at Dinner, a film I put off seeing since its basic idea (a lower-class woman stuck in…

Nothing’s Changed: Lost in America (Criterion Collection) »

By Jessica Baxter. It’s been over 30 years since Albert Brooks unleashed his on-point satire about the mental unraveling of dissatisfied yuppies in Regan-era America. And while Easy Rider (1969) the film…

L’argent: Bresson Ends »

By Christopher Sharrett. The terms “ascetic” and “austere” are too-common adjectives applied to the films of Robert Bresson. It is reasonable to apply them, but for me “constricted,” “severe,” and…

A Stumble in the Woods: First Kill »

By Elias Savada. Bruce Willis still tracks 243 on the IMDB.com STARmeter scale (I’m at 1,325,678). All kind of entertainment folk are part of the ratings, and Willis has been…

Diversity and Unity – Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb »

A Book Review by Margaret C. Flinn. Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb’s Global Cinema Cities (Columbia UP, 2016) poses as its task to explore “the evolving, mutually constitutive relations between moving…

Out of the Dark(room) and Into the Light – The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography »

By Elias Savada. There is an elegant, simple beauty in documentarian Errol Morris’s affectionate portrait of his friend, soft-spoken, 80-year-old Elsa Dorfman, in his new film. In a career that spanned…

Eleven Heroines Does a Feminist Film Make: Reading Srijit Mukherjee’s Rajkahini »

By Devapriva Sanyal and Melissa Webb. Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (2015) is the Bengali version of 2017’s much feted Begum Jaan, the film which served as the director’s first foray into Bollywood. The…

By Elias Savada. Part I: The Buildup So, how many teenagers have you met who say they want to make movies when they…

By Anthony Uzarowski. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK. There could be no better time…

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. If the glimpses we catch on screen of an actor’s body of work ultimately amount…

By John Duncan Talbird. Although not well known today, Nikolai Leskov was a famous Russian writer in the 19th century admired by such…

By Jeremy Carr. The first shot of Pop Aye (2017), Kirsten Tan’s feature film debut, shows the story’s two protagonists – the…

By Elias Savada. The hip medieval stew being served up in Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours is overcooked with naughty nuns sexually…

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Ideas, for Deleuze, do not exist above life as ideal forms but come from life as…

By Elias Savada. The sad fate and cruel savagery hoisted on many indigenous people have been part of an angst-filled sidebar on the…

By Elias Savada. With an omp pa pa, everybody sing! “Music Makes the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go…

A Book Review by Christopher Weedman. Steffen Hantke’s welcome new book Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of…

By Tony Williams. Although currently promoted mainly as a restoration of The Lodger (1927), a film that its director regarded as his…

By Elias Savada. There’s a lot of technical wizardry afoot in Dutch filmmaker Tim Smit’s feature directorial debut Kill Switch, an indie sci…

By Tony Williams. In 2003 Criterion issued a two-disk DVD version of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial Straw Dogs (1971) when the issue of…

By Tony Williams. Again Criterion have provided us with a welcome reissue of a classic film noir now in a new 2k digital…

By Martin Kudláč. In the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella is a scene with British soldiers examining a…

By Zhuo-Ning Su. Films are lives imagined, projected, simulated. When the play-pretend is effective and the make-believe works, we can hope to…

By Kate Hearst. With an artful lens, All This Panic captures the awkward and fleeting stage of teenagers on the cusp of…

By Elias Savada. If you’re not screaming mad by the end of Atomic Homefront, you obviously believe the system works. As a study…

By Christopher Sharrett. I should say at the outset that my thoughts about the social-political vision (or failure thereof) of Terry Zwigoff’s…

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. Who would have figured the Canadian director of such diverse films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974),…

By Tony Williams. In his 2015 detailed and definitive study The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the…

By John Duncan Talbird. Terrance Davies’ most recent film, A Quiet Passion, is a strange drama. It is a biopic and a period…

By Ali Moosavi. Lynn Ramsey’s violent film noir was the last film to be shown at the Cannes Official Competition. It is based…

By Jeremy Carr. The 1980s was a pivotal period for horror films. As low-budget “Video Nasty” provocations steadily faded from America’s grindhouse…

By Elias Savada. There is a hidden recluse swirling around our theaters (and video on demand), and his name is Wakefield. Please…

By Elias Savada. Aki Kaurismäki may have to scooch over a bit to make room in the upper tier of Finnish cinema for…

By Ali Moosavi. The late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s last film, 24 Frames, was shown as a special event of the 70th Cannes Film…

By Ali Moosavi. Sofia Coppola’s decision to remake Don Siegel’s 1971 film The Beguiled (in Official Competition at this year’s Cannes), seems on…

By Ali Moosavi. Taylor Sheridan has written the script for a couple of terrific thrillers recently: Sicario and Hell or High Water.…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Before you can say “Meryl Streep”, “Mamma Mia”, “Shazam”, in addition to the many superheroes and…

By Ali Moosavi. Michael Haneke’s new film Happy End played at the Official Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Haneke…

By Ali Moosavi. Michel Hazanavicius became a cinema celebrity six years ago at Cannes where The Artist became the sensation of the festival…

By Elias Savada. Grief changes you. It can drive you to do dark and drastic things outside your normal routine. Such aberrations are…

By Anthony Uzarowski. Whenever a film gets digitally restored and reissued after a considerable amount of time passes from its initial release, the…

By Christopher Sharrett. I somehow conflate in my mind’s eye images of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg/The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Les…

By Elias Savada. Thirty-eight years ago this month, the world experienced a horror like no other. Ridley Scott’s Alien intensely attacked worldwide audiences.…

By Tony Williams. With one exception, this new release does live up to the second part of the above caption. Long revered…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Despite appearing in an independent press publication, this study deserves neither to be forgotten nor regarded…

By Elias Savada. Yeah, a lot of folks have been waiting for this one. Three years ago, the creative and marketing folks behind…

By Alex Ramon. Two new films about iconic Polish artists screened at the Gdynia Film Festival, Poland’s primary showcase for its national cinema,…

By Elias Savada. This film is for me. I am a genealogist and death is a constant on my family tree. I…

By Elias Savada. Making sense out of urban chaos was more than a dream for Jane Jacobs. It was a battle cry. Jacobs,…

By Elias Savada. The film is brief (76 minutes), but the title isn’t – My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea. Not as…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Although countless books have appeared in past and present featuring stars, many who never achieved enduring…

By John Duncan Talbird. It’s hard to know why Werner Herzog still makes fiction films. He clearly loves to travel to strange and…

By Elias Savada. Both old school and old-fashioned come together in style and substance in Tommy’s Honour, Jason Connery’s passable historical look at…

By Tony Williams. Ever since seeing that unforgettable still in Kevin Brownlow’s The War, the West, and the Wilderness (1979), the grim-visage…

Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven: Loss of Grace »

By Christopher Sharrett. I have always thought that John Sturges’s 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven has suffered too unfavorably in comparison to…

By Tony Williams. Although this special Criterion three film DVD set has been available since 2008, it is only recently that I…

By Tony Williams. Long awaited by many, following either unavailability or dubious accessibility via duped 16mm copies, unwatchable VHS copies, and bootlegged…

By Ramin S. Khanjani. Of all directors associated with the pre-1979 “Iranian New Wave,” Nosratallah Karimi probably presents one odd case for…

By Christopher Sharrett. I have been meaning for some time to put pen to paper about last year’s superb achievement by Laszlo…

By Michael Betancourt. Michael Morris’ expanded cinema performances, Second Hermeneutic (2013) lasting approximately nine minutes, and Third Hermeneutic (2014) lasting approximately eleven minutes,…

By Tony Williams. “She was so much more than the Green woman in Star Trek” (George Pappy DVD audio-commentary). “What I knew I…

By David Ryan. Before United 93 opened ten years ago, the film’s previews were greeted with varying degrees of stress and grief.…

By Anthony Uzarowski. The 1950s are often seen as the time of Hollywood’s greatest splendour, yet the reality of the time was…

By Sotiris Petridis. Introduction The Star Wars saga is an internal and important part of popular culture since its first filmic text…

By Richmond B. Adams. During a conversation approximately one-third of the way through The Dark Knight (2008), Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) expresses…

By Christopher Sharrett. I use the word “excavated” in my title not because the 1977 horror film The Sentinel , directed by…

By Film International. The editors’ Top 10 and Overrated 10 include films that were released in the editors’ respective regions during 2015.…

By Fred Wagner. The Show of Shows (2015), a recently released documentary made out of archive footage shows the lost world of…

By Edgar Tijhuis. Sometimes it seems like time stood still in Slovenia. In 2009 Variety magazine reported about a “royalty battle” in…

By Tony Williams. Critic-director Stig Bjorkman, well known for his studies on directors such as Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman, has made…

By David Ryan. Rewriting history is a common academic enterprise, and crafting Elizabethan history – particularly Shakespearean biography – is composed recursively. Though…

Kurt Vonnegut Hunter Thompson Norman Mailer Tom Wolfe William Burroughs Jonathan Miller William Burroughs Jr Jacob Bronowski Robert Hughes Bob Woodward Carl…

By John Garland Winn. Jeff Barnaby, a Mi’kmaq First Nations director, was four years old when the Quebec Provincial Police raided his…

By Rajko Radović. Blood has been shed on the asphalt at night. We see it in close-up as thin red lines spreading…

By Christopher Sharrett. When I first took note of the television series Madam Secretary (2014-), I assumed it was a sort of…

By Richard Grigg. Director Guy Ritchie’s 2015 film The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is of course inspired by the U.S. television series of…

By Ramin S. Khanjani. For many avid followers of Iranian cinema across the world, the experience of this national cinema justifiably doesn’t…

By William Repass. In the thematic arc formed by Fellini’s body of work, La dolce vita (1960) can be said to represent…

By Christopher Sharrett. Some months ago I saw The Way, Way Back (2013) and was taken by it enough to buy the…

By James Knight. This August will see the US theatrical release of She’s Funny That Way, the latest feature from Peter Bogdanovich.…

By Tom Silva. Film is a living thing and so it faces an unending series of deaths. Like the mythic hero in…

By Robert K. Lightning. Lovers that demonstrate both spiritual affinity and spiritual equality have long been popular in middle-class entertainment. Repartee has…

By Geoffrey Fox. The credits roll over a black-and-white newsreel of missiles and men parading before an austere Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow…

By Tony Williams. The title of this article has a double meaning. It is primarily a reworking of that lavishly illustrated and…

By Benjamin Bergholtz. “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” (Adorno…

By Christopher Sharrett. Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is a work of such staggering importance that its…

By Daniel Garrett. Some old films have a special appeal. They might not be excellent or particularly beloved objects, and yet they…

By Francesco Pascuzzi. Already with the film’s title, Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta, 2005) sets out to toy with the…

By Tony Williams. On initial release, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Un Flic (1972) disappointed many and has remained in critical limbo to the present…

By Laura Crossley. “You’ve enjoyed the film, so now what are you going to do about the message? Tolkien didn’t just write…

By Elizabeth Mizon and Lee Salter. Digital media technologies are full of paradoxes. On one hand they are said to open up…

By Daniel Garrett. In the film Philadelphia (1993), written by Ron Nyswaner and directed by Jonathan Demme, the actor Tom Hanks is…

By Noah Charney. Branko Djuric, who goes by the nickname Djuro, is one the biggest film and television stars of the former…

By Trevor Mowchun. “Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as…

By Robert K. Lightning. “It follows that the critic should read without inappropriate bias. We cannot properly object to The Pilgrim’s Progress,…

By Wheeler Winston Dixon. We live in the age of the visible invisible; everything is supposedly available to us online, but in…

Working for the Police, Working for the City, or Selling Drugs: Stanley Corkin’s Connecting The Wire »

A Book Review Essay by John Duncan Talbird. David Simon’s television series The Wire ran on HBO from 2002-2008, five seasons of a prestige show that, in the less than ten…

The Indian Film Critics Have Done It Again!: Reading Gender in Ki & Ka Through the Cinematic Lens of R. Balki »

The Year of the Kneale Olympics – Into the Unknown: the Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale by Andy Murray and We Are the Martians edited by Neil Snowdon »

A Book Review Essay by Tony Williams. It is as if in movies, TV and books, genre progresses through a series of metaphorical prison walls. Inferior and derivative work merely…