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Festivals: Camden International Film Festival
Located midway between the cities of Portland to the south and Bangor to the north, Camden is a snug little harbor town in Maine set off against the mountains which cradle it against the sea, the...
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Interview: Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras’s Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR premiered at the New York Film Festival to extraordinary applause, reflecting not only the grip its subject matter exerts on the public but also...
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NYFF: Critics Academy Entries
The below articles were produced as part of the 2014 New York Film Festival Critics Academy, whose participants were invited to contribute writing about the selection. The Secret Sharer: Seymour: An...
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Bombast: 35, Stayin’ Alive
Avatar Digital projection came as a blitzkrieg, and carried the day before most of us knew what was happening. “Who would have dreamed film would die so quickly?” Roger Ebert wrote in November, 2011,...
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Rep Diary: Winsor McCay
This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most influential films ever made. Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur was the first animated cartoon created by the self-described “originator and...
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Kaiju Shakedown: 31 Asian Horror Movies
Talk about Asian horror and people usually think about J-horror’s dead wet girls with long black hair and bad attitudes, but scary movies have been flickering across Asia’s silver screens for decades....
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Film of the Week: Goodbye to Language
Watching Jean-Luc Godard’s recent work can be a source of joy, but also of terror—especially if you’re trying to write about it. Your eyes are bombarded with violent, abrupt changes of texture, color,...
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Pam Grossman is an independent curator, writer, and teacher of magical practice and history. She is the creator of Phantasmaphile, a blog which specializes in art and culture with a mystical bent,...
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Bombast: Horror Business
The Quatermass Experiment Halloween, which traces its roots back to the Gaelic festival of Samhain, is preceded by the one week in the year when all natural order is inverted, and decent, upright film...
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Interview: Sergei Loznitsa
Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan had its world premiere last May in a special screening at Cannes, where it could be easily missed amidst the usual ballyhoo surrounding the main Competition. Yet Loznitsa’s...
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Festivals: Locarno’s Titanus Retrospective
Tormento In 1904 a 19-year-old law school dropout named Gustavo Lombardo founded a film company in Naples. Lombardo began by distributing films by Gaumont, Éclair, Vitagraph, and other foreign...
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Film of the Week: Interstellar
In an interview in The Guardian this week, Christopher Nolan mused: “What I’ve found is, people who let my films wash over them—who don’t treat it like a crossword puzzle, or like there is a test...
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Deep Focus: Big Hero 6
In Disney’s Big Hero 6, a 14-year-old tech upstart named Hiro designs a “neurocranial” transmitter that deploys tiny robots—“microbots,” he calls them—to create any object he can imagine. What better...
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Interview: Lucie Borleteau
For FILM COMMENT's festival report on Locarno, see Chris Darke's article in the November/December issue. Far from a conventional love triangle, Fidelio: Alice’s Journey is a daring exploration of...
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Interview: Robert Drew
“I was at Life magazine producing picture stories, and I wondered why documentaries on television were dull.” That was something probably a lot of other people were wondering in the 1950s, when Robert...
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Festival: Projections at NYFF
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Projections series gracefully bore the traces of its esteemed predecessor—the 17-years-running Views from the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film...
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Rep Diary: Shark Monroe & To the Last Man
Every film contains its own private history: of career trajectories, artistic temperaments, and the texture of its landscapes. When the film is lost or unseen, that history goes dark with it. The To...
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Deep Focus: The Homesman
Tommy Lee Jones, who reached a midcareer high in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (and later directed McCarthy’s “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Jimmy Wong Yu
The One-Armed Swordsman In 1967, The One-Armed Swordsman burst onto Hong Kong screens as anti-colonialist riots swept the city. The carnage unleashed in that year turned the city into a war zone: in...
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Review: Dumb and Dumber To
Twenty years off has not dimmed the dimwittedness of Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), the morons of Dumb and Dumber and now its sequel. Though their faces have become riven...
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