Film International | Thinking Film Since 1973

The New Flesh: A Critical Analysis of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema »

By Alexander Kirschenbaum. ‘Am I different somehow? Is it live or is it Memorex?’ (Seth Brundle [Jeff Goldblum] in David Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986]) For the purposes of…

Film as politics »

By Joacim Blomqvist. The Swedish general elections of September 2010, confirmed that Sweden is becoming a less tolerant society in many ways. For the first time a xenophobic…

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The director who must (not?) be forgotten: Elio Petri and the legacy of Italian political cinema, Part 2 »

By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 46, vol. 8, no. 4, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and…

The director who must (not?) be forgotten: Elio Petri and the legacy of Italian political cinema, Part 1 »

By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 44, vol. 8, no. 2, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and…

Skateboarding in the pool in Dogtown and Z-Boys - 2001

Contemporary Cinematic Documentary and The Rebirth of Content »

By Jez Owen. Abstract Documentary suggests ‘fullness and completion, knowledge and fact’ (Nichols, 1994:1). A documentary text can provide a representation of life that an audience will read…

Pier Paolo Pasolini with his mother Susanna (Colussi) Pasolini.

Pier Paolo Pasolini Museum, Casarsa della Delizia, Italy »

By Moira Sullivan. In northeastern Italy lies the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. “Friulan”, a romance dialect, is spoken in Friuli. Casarsa della Delizia is one of the towns…

Zhao Tao as Tao (left) and friends at World Park in THE WORLD. Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films

Films and Cities: The World (China, 2005) »

By Hector Arkomanis. This column is the first in a series that discusses films in the context of specific cities, times and histories. Each time, we start with…

Revisiting Tea and Sympathy: Sexual Paranoia in Fifties America »

By Christopher Sharrett. Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama Tea and Sympathy, finally released on DVDby Warner Archive, deserves revaluation, given its neglect during its long absence from the home video market.…

Bloodied Light: The cinema of Martin McDonagh »

By Marshall Botvinick. ‘I’m sorry,’ says a somber doctor just as the opening credits for Six Shooter(2005), Martin McDonagh’s first film, dissolve. For a playwright known for his…

Revisiting Citizen Ruth »

By Lesley Brill. Alexander Payne’s 1996 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, is generally remembered as an incongruously comic look at the struggle between opponents of legal abortion and…

Festival Reports

Edinburgh Film Festival | 15-26 June, 2011 »

By Yun-hua Chen. This year’s EIFF feels very different in all aspects, not only led by the new producer Jimmy Mulligan but also affected by the general budget cut in the UK. It…

By Gary M. Kramer. Silverdocs, at the AFI Silver Spring, MD, is the biggest American festival for non-fiction film. This year’s slate featured several observational documentaries, including El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Wetzel,…

Interview

Saving The Cinema Museum »

By Deirdre O’Neill. Tucked away in an unfashionable part of London, The Cinema Museum is a rather well kept…

By Matthew Sorrento. While adapting Alicia Erian’s novel Towelhead for the big screen, Alan Ball considered using the title…

By Giuseppe Sedia. According to a decision recently voted by the Polish Senate, the remaining state-owned film studios are…

By Peter Rinaldi. “What’s the line for?” a middle aged man asks me. It’s 11:30pm on a Saturday night…

By Moira Sullivan. This interview with Maria Schneider was made in March 2001, when she was the guest of…

Nikki: Brilliant review
K.Eaton: another point re: that pseudo freeze-frame of Bela Tarr that illustrates Tarkovsky’s view of time in...
K.Eaton: an amateur perspective is the perspective of most viewers. Tarkovsky doesn’t require us to know...
Marianne: amazing descriptives make me feel like i was there!
K.Eaton: to operate in a musty vacuum you need a to be a windbag. to dissect the poetic form in a process designed to...

Review

Chris Cunningham Live »

By Jamie Isbell. A large black curtain slowly parts and reveals three grey screens. Then a dense and inconsistent ripple of excitement erupts from a shuffling and enthusiastically rowdy crowd…

Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production, John Berra, (2008) »

Book review by Sebastian Manley. Variously characterised as an American art cinema, a B-division of Hollywood, and a marketplace of talent and ideas, the US ‘independent’ sector has inspired a…

The Arbor (2010) »

By Jacob Mertens. If art is a reflection of our lives, then what becomes of art when we look at it through its own prism? In Clio Barnard’s genre-defying The…

The Tunnel (2011) »

By Carolyn Lake. Enjoying its world premiere on May 18 at Sydney’s Popcorn Taxi, Carlo Ledesma’s Australia indie horror flick, The Tunnel, has already garnered an audience of over seven…

By William Frasca. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats simply because I was able to recognize…

By Janine Gericke. A tree has wide spread roots – thousands of forking lines that twine into a long straight trunk –…

By Rajko Radovic. I like films that tell me something about the world we live in. I like to see mechanics exposed,…

By Bryan Nixon. The opening credit sequence of 127 Hoursis a split screen triptych bursting with vibrant colors of modern society: crowds…

By Matthew Sorrento. Along with a direct title, this film has a high-concept premise: a long-distance runner who robs banks. Once we…

By Jacob Mertens. Watching narrative films has always been a fleeting, ephemeral experience for me. After the initial flush of excitement, each…

By Jacob Mertens. The towering behemoth of a forest troll looms over the cameraman, its three heads sniffing the air violently, a…

By Jacob Mertens. There’s a lot at play with the new female-driven comedy Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig. The chaos of marriage…

Film International is pleased to announce a new initiative called ‘In the Field’. It is our virtual take on a talent campus…

By Kierran Horner. The opening sequence of Resnais’ latest film is an abstract one; a non-narrative medium-shot of a tower in a…

By Kierran Horner. Susana (1951) is a minor Buñuel film, even within the scope of his comparatively weak Mexican period, as director…

CinemAfrica 2: Outside the Law » The Illusionist: ‘There are no magicians’ » CinemAfrica 1: Viva Riva! and The Last Flight of the Flamingo » My Heart of Darkness (Sweden, 2011) » ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am an oilman’: There Will Be Blood »

Features

Films and Cities: The World (China, 2005) »

By Hector Arkomanis. This column is the first in a series that discusses films in the context of specific cities, times and…

By Christopher Sharrett. Vincente Minnelli’s melodrama Tea and Sympathy, finally released on DVDby Warner Archive, deserves revaluation, given its neglect during its long…

By Marshall Botvinick. ‘I’m sorry,’ says a somber doctor just as the opening credits for Six Shooter(2005), Martin McDonagh’s first film, dissolve.…

By Lesley Brill. Alexander Payne’s 1996 feature film debut, Citizen Ruth, is generally remembered as an incongruously comic look at the struggle…

By Kierran Horner. The White Ribbon (2009) is about guilt. It is another film by Michael Haneke about guilt. But it would…

By Jonathan Rozenkrantz. Every film is a documentary. (Bill Nichols 2001) There is no such thing as documentary [...]. (Trinh T. Minh-ha…

By Kierran Horner. Tarkovsky saw himself as a creator of temporal filmic images. In his published ruminations on film, Sculpting in Time;…

By Steven J. Ross. Why should anyone seriously interested in class care about movies? To answer this, I ask readers to participate…

By Barry Keith Grant. In 1957 Francois Truffaut rallied the writers of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma around the radical…

By Christopher Sharrett. As the most extraordinary art form of modernity, the cinema’s great accomplishment has been its subversion of various received…

The story of an Italian/North Korean action movie joint venture. By Johannes Schönherr. “Amerinda Est. Presents … Frank Zagarino and Mark…

By Robin Wood. Introduction Kiarostami’s development has been remarkably swift, each stage marked by radical change. Essentially, he has moved from a…

By Dan Callahan. In the long last years of her life, Louise Brooks, isolated in Rochester, New York and utterly tired of…

By Robin Wood. To call Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible(Irréversible, 2002) controversial would be an understatement. It has had its defenders, but their voices…