Search Results for: "cheap"

In a recent blog post for Columbia University Press – “Anxious Afterthoughts on Anxious Cinephilia” – Sarah Keller provides her latest book with a casual addendum, addressing film in the age of Coronavirus to u...

During this strange period of lockdown, I’ve divided my time between writing, reading, exercise, goofy time with my wife, following the daily news Horrorshow, and watching movies on Turner Classic Movies – main...

The end of The Shining will always be enigmatic. In the movie’s final scene we see a photograph taken at the Overlook Hotel on July 4, 1921. It shows Jack Torrance front and center as the Gatsby-like maestro of...

Four decades is a short time in the grand scheme of all history, but in the realm of film music, it is a significant span. It is time enough to see overall trends and important shifts, and it provides an excell...

The label of “auteur cinema”, whether poetic or political, is often the cloak under which African cinema is “discovered” and appreciated. We know the canon: Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cissé, Med Hondo, Djibril...

We’ve seen this scenario before, but only in the cinema: a mysterious plague, for which there is no cure, suddenly appears out of nowhere and ravages the globe. In everything from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh S...

As I type these words, a few months after leaving the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), I don’t exactly know when the next fest will be. Stranded in quarantine in the north of Italy as the C...

The narrative of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010) follows the last days of its titular character in Isaan, the northeastern region of Tha...

A million years ago, or what feels about that long, Berlin got away with one of the last major film festivals before Covid-19 halted not just life as we know it, but also the film industry’s long-established pr...

The winner of this year’s Best Picture award at the Oscars was a South Korean film about class resentment, economic desperation, and the parasitic dependence of the upper social strata on our world’s basement d...

Vittorio De Sica’s wartime drama La ciociara (Two Women, 1960) had a decidedly peculiar genesis. Adapted from a 1957 novel by Alberto Moravia, with a script by De Sica’s long-time collaborator Cesare Zavattini,...

Busan 2019 marked a year of celebration, with multiple retrospective screenings in honour of the 100th anniversary of Korean cinema coinciding with Bong Joon-ho’s Gi-saeng-chung (Parasite) receiving Korea’s fir...

ENTRIES IN PART 7: Maria San Filippo Jose Sarmiento Hinojosa Christine Sathiah Adrian Schober Howard Schumann Christopher Sikich Christopher Small Rachel Small Jordan M. Smith Valerie Soe Mark Spra...

On its surface, the nascent trend of the screencast film could be dismissed as a mere vessel for cheap, hokey B-movie fare, typically preoccupied with stalkers, supernatural beasties, and the worst monsters of ...

To understand what the last ten years of cinema have been about, one has to start at the turn of the last century – the year 2000 – when Hollywood decided that it was time to get rid of film itself, and make th...

The unpredictable notion of control is beneficial for conflict in storytelling, particularly in the features and documentaries of the 22nd Revelation Perth International Film Festival, seemingly spilling out of...

24 Frames, the final feature from master Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, grew out of an abandoned project the auteur had been developing in conjunction with the Louvre. The plan was to bring a number of ico...

“Renata Adler said television was an appliance rather than an artform.” Woody Allen in Meetin’ WA, Jean-Luc Godard, 1986 It was in high-school that a precocious Woody Allen (Allan Stewart Konigsberg) started ...

b. 10 October, 1906, Shanghai d. 31 January, 1951, Hong Kong Fei Mu was a director whose life coincided with huge upheavals in the history of China. A man of deep intellect and a love of his country, he was...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema issue 80, September 2016. “You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationshi...

By Ermanno Olmi’s own admission, I fidanzati (The Engagement), his third feature, is a pivotal work in his career. His first feature, Il tempo si è fermato (Time Stood Still, 1959) had been accused by Italian c...

It took an open-air screening of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy - held in the courtyard of an abandoned castle in the middle of Transylvania, and with lead actor and megastar Nicolas Cage in attendance - to make me real...

Picture this, dear reader: from the very beginning of this year’s Cannes film festival, I had been having nightmares about the prospect of getting into the inaugural press screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Once ...

The real is leaders whose relationship to the world is only comprised of statistics, figures and data and have lost all sense of reality and humanity The real is when at 3 years old you ask your mother why t...

The Warden and the Young Man In 2012, Ava DuVernay made history by becoming the first black woman filmmaker to get a major award at Sundance. Since then, she has continued to change the way African American wo...

On Oct 30, the day before the American Film Market opened in Santa Monica, the Asian Society of Southern California had organised the US-China Entertainment Summit at the Skirball Center, allowing the speakers ...

2019 was the year that the Berlin International Film Festival wanted us all to know that it takes gender parity seriously. Not only did the festival expand, in its 69th edition, the gender statistics it keeps o...

“Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), laconically declares to screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), as he shrugs off the outraged respons...

Sidney Hayers’ Night of the Eagle (1962) was based on the 1943 Fritz Leiber novel Conjure Wife, which had been filmed once before by Universal as Weird Woman (Reginald Le Borg, 1944), one of its “Inner Sanctum”...

Towards the end of Sergio Leone’s opening sequence in Once upon a Time in America (1984), the film’s protagonist, David “Noodles” Aaronson (Robert De Niro), flees to a bus station where he buys a one-way ticket...

ENTRIES IN PART 6: Nick P. George Papadopoulos Andreea Pătru Yoana Pavlova Jesse Percival Antoni Peris Grao Simon Petri-Lukács Andréa Picard Fidel Jesús Quirós Christopher Llewellyn Reed Bérénice R...

Spanish version / Versión en Español. Icónica. By Valeria de los Ríos Escobar Translated by César Albarrán-Torres In their 2010 book Novísimo cine chileno, Ascanio Cavallo and Gonzalo Maza coined the ter...

This will not be a typical festival review, in that it will not offer in-depth commentary – or even a “best of” roundup – on a sizable selection of what was programmed over Labor Day weekend in the mining town-...

b. 16 July 1970, Bangkok, Thailand Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s cinema is one of transgression, of social, carnal and metaphysical border-crossings. Born on July 16, 1970 in Bangkok, Weerasethakul was raised ...

Among his many claims to fame, Marlon Brando was noteworthy as a supporter of Native American heritage and civil rights, famously sending activist Sacheen Littlefeather to the 45th Academy Awards ceremony to pu...

I fully admit to having trouble with nostalgia – in life, but especially on film. So searing is the “real” version, I find, it has to be at least partially repressed. Nostalgia’s screen portrayal, meanwhile, ne...