As I received the rare privilege of attending both the Red Carpet and Press Conference for Blood Ties (2013), I will contextualize this review with exclusive interview material from some of the major persons involved in the film, such as producer Alain Attal, director Guillaume C... Read More »
Having himself been a part of the Polish solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa—G’dansk dockworker and proletariat turned Nobel prize holding President—Andrez Wajda proves to be the most qualified filmmaker to depict his biopic. A taciturn yet strong willed person, Walesa (Robert... Read More »
“You farmers have nothing to fall back on,” hammers the accountant when discussing retirement prospects with his client Gaby, lamb producer and owner of “La Ferme Gagnon and Sons”. It's a painful truth that underscores much of Le démantèlement (The Dismantling), the touching seco... Read More »
Acclaimed Toronto documentary filmmaker Alan Zweig (Vinyl, A Hard Name) has a knack of bringing the personal out of his subjects while still keeping it to the heart. He brings his new film, When Jews Were Funny, to The 2013 Toronto Film Festival. It’s a 90-minute examination of J... Read More »
After undergoing the most staggering physical transformation since Christian Bale in The Machinist (2004), Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club (2013) sports the role of a desperate, well-intentioned reject seeking redemption and freedom in an all too aggrandizing system of ... Read More »
A few years ago, it seemed like underground Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke was about to go mainstream. He was planning to make a big budget martial arts movie – one can assume set in the kind of apolitical historical setting that soothe Communist censors. Instead, Jia abandoned th... Read More »
Depicting the actual tribulations of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor)—a free, learned man from Saratoga, kidnapped and sold into slavery—Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave (2013) is an unrestricted illustration of mental and physical torture and the intrinsic human need to surviv... Read More »
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) is an unparalleled demonstration of cinematic motion. The fluid nature of the camera and figure movement recall the ebb and flow once found in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934); however it is now the vacuum of space causing one to drift uncontrollably ... Read More »
It’s over forty years since Dennis Hopper made The Last Movie. A horse wrangler decides to quit film, shacks up with a Peruvian whore, and goes on a cinematic hallucinatory trip while philosophizing on storytelling and the making of movies. It was made during a time when cinema t... Read More »
An epic monument to University life, as supported by insight into the policies, relationships, and functions of students, faculty, and administrators at UC Berkeley, Fredrick Wiseman’s four-hour documentary At Berkeley (2013) provides an inscrutable and exceedingly thorough inves... Read More »
As both a motif to service the narrative as well as the central material or object being explored, the ephemeral nature of wind—with both metaphorical and literal values—attests to an unconscious motivation of life, the invisible substance that propels one forward. Though Jiro (H... Read More »
Hitoshi Matsumoto is a Japanese comedic legend. Through his successes being in the comedic duo of Downtown, Matsumoto has shown a unique flair at entertaining an audience while still remaining an elusive figure within the industry. As a director, he’s brought a whole different pa... Read More »
