Search Results for: "cheap"

In 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni had completed his English language trio of films for Italian producer Carlo Ponti and MGM, an unique mainstream contract for an essentially art house filmmaker. Zabriskie Poin...

A disclosure is in order. The author of The Lumière Galaxy – Italian-born, Connecticut-based film studies professor Francesco Casetti – teaches in my department, and has been a key mentor figure over the years,...

In the first decade of the twentieth century, moving images were a ubiquitous popular culture form, a fixture of fairgrounds, vaudeville houses, and emergent stand-alone nickelodeon venues. As one of many “chea...

Vanity is so deeply rooted in man’s heart, that a soldier, a criminal, a cook, or a porter will boast and expect to have admirers, and even philosophers want them, and even those who write against all the above...

Feature image: The Diary of a Teenage Girl (dir. Marielle Heller) A recent medical report intuits that people who complain live longer and healthier lives; so maybe this report is going to shave off a few week...

Boogie Nights (1997),Paul Thomas Anderson’s first fully formed film after the frustration and battles of his debut feature Hard Eight (1996), was conceived when he was 17 years old. Ten years later, after Ander...

Entries in part 3: Lucas Hammer Michael Helms Alain Hertay Lee Hill Wai Ho Joshua Hoffmann Alexander Horwath Peter Hourigan Brian Hu Christoph Huber Zachary Ingle Tara Judah Dominik Kamalzade...

Dennis Hopper was a master curator. While known across the globe for his extremely surrealist, wild, hip and very “method” acting capabilities in both Hollywood and international films, Hopper was also among th...

A cool Paris in the evening, 1951. Atop a flight of stairs the window to a modest apartment sits closed, overlooking Rue de Seine. (Take a left at the end of the street, Musée d’Orsay; take a right, Notre Dame....

Originally published in Film Digest no. 28, December 1967, pp. 11-22. Republished with the permission of the author. “All art is life; some life is art” My first response to Truffaut’s La Peau douce is to dec...

“Hong Kong Calling!” Europe’s leading festival of Asian popular cinema, the Far East Film Festival (FEFF) in Udine, Italy, announced the theme for its 16th edition with this press release strapline in early Mar...

Not all actors are filmmakers, and not all filmmakers can act. And certainly not all actor-filmmakers walk in slow motion in Times Square with cans of oil poised on their heads (in performance protest of the 20...

Looking over the Frontier It’s a pity that, at Sundance, we are so busy trying to discover the next hot feature that the wonderful offerings of the New Frontier section are not at the top of our priorities. A ...

“Most of the filmmakers I cover don’t get paid to make their films, so why should I expect to get paid to write about them?” – Michael Sicinski To get straight to the point: if the 2014 International Film Fest...

“Friday night too tired; Saturday night too drunk; Sunday, too far away.” – “The Shearer’s Wife’s Lament” Sunday Too Far Away is a film that never quite settles on its identity or purpose. It begins with a ba...

THE ENTRIES PART 1 Francisco Algarín Navarro Victor Alicea Michael Anderson Geoff Andrew Julian Antos Armas Miguel Charlotte Aumont Sean Axmaker Martyn Bamber Mike Bartlett Raphaël...

Albert Serra It was with some trepidation that I watched Catalonian director Albert Serra’s Historia de la meva mort (The Story of My Death) at this year’s Viennale. After quickly gaining notoriety as an en...

An elderly Cajun recalls his life spent in the Louisiana bayous for decades as he has struggled to survive on the meager income of a crabber and oysterman. He breaks down, confessing, “It’s my whole life; it’s ...

Tokyo's period of acute urban unrest extended across the 1960s, beginning with widespread rioting, and demonstrations around the parliament building, in 1960, and culminating in sustained protests and confronta...

It is quite unusual to see Isa Genzken naked. In Zwei Frauen im Gefecht (Two Women in Combat, 1972) the artist takes her clothes off all the time. In fact, the entire film consists of a perpetual dressing and u...

“The question of national cinema has been ultimately one of aesthetics and taste.”  –Charles Acland (1) “It is something of a challenge...to think about English Canadian cinema as something other than a faile...

It rained during most of my stay at the latest Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) – a thick, persistent, almost sweet, drizzle that covered the horizon in greyish tones and gave the cityscape an air o...

When one first visits the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF), it is neither the films nor the red carpet that make the strongest impression. Rather, something else immediately catches one’s attention: a d...

There are festivals that are objectively deemed to be ‘major’, and then there are festivals that have a special place in our individual hearts. The Viennale certainly occupies this latter position for me, but I...

Mine was at least a twofold purpose for flying half way around the world to the far west late this June just passed. Long had I wanted to make my way to Karlovy Vary for the Czech Republic's A-list film festiva...

Anouk Aimée, as Lola in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), sunglasses against the strong Los Angeles light, was the signature image of this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna’s 27th festival of “retrieved cinem...

The lawyer (and future Polish senator) Krzysztof Piesiewicz met the director Krzysztof Kieślowski while the latter was shooting a documentary on the courts under Polish martial law. Piesiewicz, who would go on ...

Introduction and Context: (Up)Setting the Stage “It was the mid-1970s,” reminisces a Chinese blogger, writing over three decades later in November 2009. “I was in my third year of primary school … in a small J...

“I don’t initiate violence, I retaliate.” –Chuck Norris Plot Synopsis (major spoiler alert): Jim (Dominic Purcell) is the kind of working class dude New York used to be inhabited by before his ilk was driven ...

In the final shot of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975), the amateur detective/jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stares icily at his own reflection in a pool of still-warm blood. The killer...

In a rare idle moment at Cannes, amidst the hectic schedule of screenings, I found myself nursing a glass of mineral water on the terrace of the Caffé Roma, a sprawling establishment abutting the Croisette, mer...

Udine's Far East Film Festival (FEFF) is Europe's only festival focused on East Asian popular cinema. It is also one of the most pleasant and relaxed to attend. Winter has finally gone and you can sit outside b...

Let us say that I am in London’s National Gallery, looking at Giovanni Battista Viola’s “Landscape with a Hunting Party”, which could not have been painted after the artist’s death in 1622. Here we have somethi...

In the early 1960s, director Roger Corman was on fire. Coming off a wave of ultra-exploitational titles for the fledgling film production/distribution company American International Pictures (AIP), which arguab...

I. Where the Crocodiles Are: Mad Bastards I am really proud of this movie most of all because it does justice to the tough men of The Kimberley who have transformed their lives by tempering their wildness, and...

The Angels’ Share (2012) is a Cannes Jury Prize winning film. Given this accolade it seems a little surprising that the film’s central focus is whisky. Whisky and young Scots in kilts, to be precise. Yet more s...