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In the realm of Hollywood cinema, the phrase “actors' director” is a fairly common descriptor, thrown about casually in the popular press and used as shorthand by critics to characterise a filmmaker who priorit...

A professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, Dana Polan has written prolifically on film and television since receiving a PhD from Stanford in 1980 and a Doctorat d’État from the Univ...

Dekalb Elementary (d. Reed Van Dyk), a huis-clos which deftly manoeuvres the politics of race and class in America, was the winner of this year’s Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Fest...

Nash Edgerton, the older brother of Australian film star Joel Edgerton, is primarily known in his country of birth, perhaps, for his early and cheeky short films, often seen at the early iterations of Tropfest....

(H)e(r)metic Art Ad Nauseam: David Lynch's Six Men Getting Sick (1967)  Part of our makeup as social animals is that certain of our activities, when visualised, tend to create a mirror effect in the viewer. Se...

There’s a dark and a troubled side of life… – Ada Blenkhorn and Howard Entwisle, “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1899) The opening line of the standard American folk song quoted above, often erroneously attributed ...

Half a century from the moment when British cinema flickered so brightly as to contend on even footing with Hollywood’s most mainstream product in the American market it remains Alexander Walker’s accounts that...

In order to understand what the collaborative filmmaking couple Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groβ, known simply as Nana & Simon, do so beautifully in their new feature, Chemi Bedinieri Ojakhi (My Happy Fami...

to Fidel, until forever... A sense of self-referential irrelevance may assail the consummate festival-goer inhabiting a world of films few outside the festival circuit will ever even hear of. The opposite felt...

“I think there was something internally stimulating to go (to) that space, collectively there was a high, a mutual fantasy, we forgot we were making anything – it seemed like the performance was really for one ...

When African-American filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka passed away in 2012, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive Jan-Christopher Horak stated that Fanaka was dismayed that his films were picked up by a vid...

This article discusses cinematic extremes - on-screen sex and violence but also extremes of grain and texture and production cultures - in the work of several women directors closely associated with the undergr...

Abstract >> Hardcore horror meets at the intersection between pornography and horror. Films such as Fred Vogel’s August Underground trilogy, Shane Ryan’s Amateur Porn Star Killer series, Lucifer Valent...

“You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationship between pornography and horror “Roberta is a pioneer, a ground-br...

Every June, Sydney’s winter streets come alive with two festivals of light. For one of these festivals, the promenades around Circular Quay are backed up with pedestrians, partitioned off and carefully patrolle...

In Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay conjures beautiful images out of the grimness of a council estate in 1970s Glasgow in the middle of a rubbish collectors’ strike. Her first feature length film links to the work of o...

This article seeks to interrogate the role of the image in confronting changes to the ways they function within what we may term ‘new media’, and the effects these have had on the traditional “apparatus” of the...

It’s one of the oldest clichés in football. A team dominates the match and is ahead on the scoreboard at half-time, but throws their lead away after play resumes. Or the reverse: after meekly surrendering in th...

“Rockin’ the Boat’s a Drag. You Gotta Sink the Boat!”: Robert Downey Sr.’s Anarchist Cinema b. 24 June 1936, New York City, United States Long, long, long ago and very far away, in Manhattan in the 1960s, I k...

This article interrogates the constraints of micro-budget cinema via a distinctive, non-standard approach to producing, screenwriting, mise en scène and performance in the cinema of Matías Piñeiro. This will ex...

“It’s a movie for kids, they’re not going to dig it, man!” Peter Tork, Head The story is, by now, familiar. Amidst dwindling cinema attendance and the migration of the mass audience to television, Hollywood’s...

Eva Orner is an Australian filmmaker now based primarily in Los Angeles, who began her career working in Australian television in the 1990s. She moved to New York in 2005 and soon after began working as produce...

The pioneering British filmmaker John Akomfrah is co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective and director of The Nine Muses (2010) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013). The following interview focuses on four ...

This is an appropriate question, as last fall the 34 year-old Canadian festival unfolded its second year with its new administrative team (Jacqueline Dupuis taking over the functions of Executive Director in 20...

On the second full day of this year’s Berlin Film Festival, George Clooney’s earnest face peered out with an admonishing pointer finger from one of the local tabloids – not, as one might expect, in the well-wor...

The AFI FEST presented by Audi is a great opportunity to catch up with films you have missed somewhere else, while offering Angelinos who don’t travel a showcase for those that, otherwise, may not make it to ou...

This article reads Martin Heidegger’s lectures on dwelling alongside Pier Paolo Pasolini’s depiction of Casarsa in “L’Usignolo” (“The Nightingale”) and of the Roman periphery in Mamma Roma (Pier Paolo Pasolini,...

We are living at a tenuous moment. Politics are at a flashpoint. Nation-states seem put to the test every new month. Meanwhile the chasm between rich and poor never stops growing wider. As the 2015 New York Fil...

Film co-ops were born out of necessity – both economic and political. During the 1960s and 1970s, avant-garde and experimental cinema, “expanded cinema” and varying strands of independent filmmaking sought to g...

I am watching Chantal Akerman talk about No Home Movie (2015) following the screening at Locarno in August. She talks a lot, she doesn’t want to stop. It’s incredibly moving. Only two weeks ago I saw the film ...

At the closing night ceremony of the 15th T-Mobile New Horizons Film Festival, the host asked each winning filmmaker that graced the stage what “new horizons” meant to them. Awkward answers aside, it was also a...

The annual controversy at this year’s Locarno Film Festival started well before its screens flickered to life in early August. In fact, a vehement protest, heated debate, and threatened boycott started almost a...

As I walked through the old park, icebound and solitary, I evoked the past with my fellow spectre. With eyes deadened, and lips softened, our voices could barely be heard. Was the Cannes film festival really th...

France-based Austrian documentary filmmaker Hubert Sauper is not used to retrospectives of his work. But things may soon change, as the critical acclaim and gradual release of his latest film We Come as Friends...

Introduction In 2004 an advertisement featuring a car that transformed into a dancing robot appeared on US and European television. At thirty seconds in length and powerfully reminiscent of the filmed vaudevil...

The canon shouldn’t be put behind glass in a museum. I’m interested in the idea of opening up canonical figures – we should be dealing with them as our contemporaries. (1) - Matías Piñeiro The first of five f...