Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

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…

The Aesthetic Majesty of King Hu: A Touch of Zen on Criterion »

By Tony Williams. As I write, hours tick away for the latest unimportant event in film history – the Hollywood Academy Awards which will have millions glued to…

The Resurrection of Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1938) on Olive Films »

By Christopher Weedman. The past couple of months have been full of rich rewards for admirers of the late Abel Gance. This brilliant and innovative French film director…

I Wake Up Screaming: Far from “Kansas” »

By Anthony J. Steinbock. The Maltese Falcon is often considered to be the first film noir of the classical noir period (beginning in 1941 and ending in 1958…

Festival Reports

Viennale and Thessaloniki Film Festival 2016 »

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…

Tribeca Talks: Directors Series - Alejandro González Iñárritu. Photo by B Lacombe.

By Gary M. Kramer. This year, at the Tribeca Film Festival, one of the Tribeca Talks programs featured Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu being interviewed by Yugoslavia-born artist, Marina Abramović. “She is the…

Sexy Durga (Sanal Kumar Sasidharan, 2017)

By Martin Kudláč. International Film Festival Rotterdam that built its brand on investigating, gathering and curating the future of the world cinema through a long-term focus on emerging auteurs and discoveries possessing an innovative…

Interview

Visions of Invasion: An Interview with Mathieu Ratthe on The Gracefield Incident »

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…

By Gary M. Kramer. Newton is co-writer/director Amit Masurkar’s nifty film about title character (a charismatic Rajkummar Rao), an…

By Matthew Fullerton. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe, Austria’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film for the 89th Academy…

Tony Williams: Well done, Michael, and thanks for this response Rob. I have VARIETY on VHS and noted with interest...
Rob Hayes: Dear Michael, This is a much-belated thank you from the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra. It was responses...
Christopher Sharrett: I found this film to be very poorly conceived. It would have served itself much better to look...
Tony Williams: After entering a jerry-built structure on the ground floor and seeing its shaky foundations, it is...
Matthew Sorrento: It appears as if Tony never made it to the second story….

Review

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 Laurence 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…

A Most Assured First Feature: One Penny »

By Elias Savada. Part I: The Buildup So, how many teenagers have you met who say they want to make movies when they grow up? Fame and fortune is just around…

Maurice Revisited: A Timely Return to Theaters »

By Anthony Uzarowski. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the UK. There could be no better time to revisit one of the country’s greatest cinematic…

A Feisty Wizard of Cinema: Mickey Rooney, a Show Business Life by James A. MacEachern »

A Book Review by Louis J. Wasser. If the glimpses we catch on screen of an actor’s body of work ultimately amount to autobiography, the late Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) told…

The Good Bones of Lady Macbeth »

By John Duncan Talbird. Although not well known today, Nikolai Leskov was a famous Russian writer in the 19th century admired by such contemporaries as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov. A…

A Road Movie at “Elephant Speed”: Pop Aye »

By Jeremy Carr. The first shot of Pop Aye (2017), Kirsten Tan’s feature film debut, shows the story’s two protagonists – the world-weary architect Thana, played by Thaneth Warakulnukroh, and…

Bla(h)sphemy to the Nunth Degree: The Little Hours »

By Elias Savada. The hip medieval stew being served up in Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours is overcooked with naughty nuns sexually rampaging through the Tuscan countryside. Their simmering pelvic…

Authorship, History, and Reception: The Cinema of Hal Hartley edited by Steven Rybin »

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Ideas, for Deleuze, do not exist above life as ideal forms but come from life as a flow of forces and desires…All of Deleuze’s…

The Unhappiness of Growing Up: Sami Blood »

By Elias Savada. The sad fate and cruel savagery hoisted on many indigenous people have been part of an angst-filled sidebar on the world stage for centuries. Explore/invade/plunder/kill/assimilate. In the history…

Baby Driver: With Films Like This, Who Needs Drugs? »

By Elias Savada. With an omp pa pa, everybody sing! “Music Makes the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round, the Wheels Go Round!” And when you’re finished, check out the…

Mutating War Traumas: Monsters in the Machine by Steffen Hantke »

A Book Review by Christopher Weedman. Steffen Hantke’s welcome new book Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (University Press of…

Ivor and Hitch: the Criterion 2017 DVD Versions of The Lodger and Downhill »

By Tony Williams. Although currently promoted mainly as a restoration of The Lodger (1927), a film that its director regarded as his first real film, this two-disc DVD also includes…

Power Off: Kill Switch »

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 fi race-to-save-the-planet flick set in the depressing, dystopian…

Taking Stock – The Second Edition of the Criterion Collection’s Straw Dogs »

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

Eternal Fugitives: Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night from Criterion »

By Tony Williams. Again Criterion have provided us with a welcome reissue of a classic film noir now in a new 2k digital restoration with valuable feature material including the 2007…

Cinematic Archeology and the Portrayal of a “Wonder Woman”: Letters from Baghdad »

By Martin Kudláč. In the 1996 film The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella is a scene with British soldiers examining a map. “But can we get through those mountains?”…

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…

By Devapriya Sanyal. At first glance it may seem that Glory, the new Bulgarian film directed by Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva, belongs…

A Book Review by Irv Slifkin. In The Lives of Robert Ryan (Wesleyen University Press, 2015), Chicago film critic J.R. Jones points…

By Elias Savada. The actual typhoon in After the Storm is more than a physical catastrophe. It’s a powerful metaphor for an…

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Last week, a friend and fellow reviewer Chris Sharrett told me about his experiences at the…

By Jeremy Carr. Since the release of Noah Baumbach’s 2015 documentary on Brian De Palma, the legendary filmmaker, who has for decades…

By Devapriya Sanyal. Qissa (“fable”), Anup Singh’s second directorial venture (2013; released in India in 2015), deals with many issues at the same time, with…

By Elias Savada. Let’s refresh: the films of French writer-director François Ozon tend to be sly, unsettling, and daring observations of the human…

By Elias Savada. As I watched Personal Shopper, I wondered if this new, mostly English-language film from French filmmaker Olivier Assayas was a…

By Christopher Weedman. Janus Films’ stunning 4K restoration of the “Marseille Trilogy” by the esteemed Marcel Pagnol is one of the essential…

By Neila Driss. Michal Goldman’s documentary, Nasser’s Republic, The Making of Modern Egypt (2016), was screened on November 20th during the 38th…

By Elias Savada. The indie movie Donald Cried joins a growing number of feature films based on a short subject (among my…

By Elias Savada. Kong: Skull Island, Hollywood’s latest outing for its furry Eighth Wonder of the World, has arrived in an energetic, well-mounted,…

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. The film critic Robin Wood (1931-2009) was one of those writers who helped the general public…

By Elias Savada. Ever wonder what it’s like to spend a long day in the life with a comic book artist? Or…

By Christopher Sharrett. I was curious about Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. I heard rumors that it was a riposte to Guess…

Once There Were Bawdy Tales: Nosrat Karimi’s Matrimonial Comedies »

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…

By Sheana Ochoa. Anyone who has watched the scene in the trailer of The Theory of Everything when Stephen Hawking’s character pulls…

By Christopher Sharrett. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is last season’s fascinating, much-discussed contribution to the horror film, a genre that…

By Martin Smith. Despite increased transparency and liberalisation at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in recent decades, Britain remains one…