Non-fiction work such as documentaries, are investigatory and revelatory forces in cinema. The subject of focus is given various treatments or views via interviews, footage, and various settings of the subjects past and present. Sometimes the subject is hero or an moral cause.
The road for the idiosyncratic dreamer is a difficult one and wrought with perilous self-doubt and a lifetime of practicality nagging at one’s confidence. The ghosts of parents offer pragmatic advice in the back of the mind, sometimes leading the dreamer to forfeit their plans or relegate them to haunting whispers that become part of …
As children, we imagine a future where our dreams come true. We see our future selves on a foundation of ideals, embodying all that we could hope to become. These are images of adults that are fulfilled completely by an occupation that is directly in line with our greatest aspirations and favorite pastimes. However, as time passes …
The Taviani brothers came into their own as sole directors in the late 1960s. But it was not until their fifth feature, Padre padrone, that they were first recognised for their efforts (it won both the Palme d’Or and Fipresci prize at the Cannes International Film Festival). Padre padrone is based on the 1975 autobiographical novel …
A.J. Edwards, the Texas born writer/director of The Better Angels, spent most of his career editing and working as second-unit director for Terrence Malick on films such as The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder and the forthcoming Knight of Cups. With The Better Angels,Edwards graduates to the director’s chair and the …
After winning the Best Director award for Naked in 1993 and being awarded with the Palme d’Or for Secrets & Lies in 1996, Mike Leigh returns to the Croisette with his biopic Mr. Turner, a film about the revolutionary British painter J.M.W Turner. Mostly known for his dramatic marine and landscape paintings, Turner was one of the leading artists of Romanticism and a
Olivier Dahan’s Grace of Monaco already caused quite some controversy even before it was officially released as the opening film of the Festival on Wednesday night. Not only did the Royal family of Monaco describe the film as a “farce” long before its release in Cannes, Dahan and distributor Harvey Weinstein had an ongoing heated discussion about the film’s final cut. Once…
The eight individuals in total credited for Frankie & Alice under story and screenplay make terribly tempting—too tempting for many, no doubt—the allure of an arguably insensitive joke. But to suggest the movie might share the dissociative identity disorder of its subject is to mistakenly afford each of the films it looks likely to become at any given moment would have any identity of its own. As directed by television mainstay Geoffrey Sax—last seen on the big screen with the ill-fated Alex Rider outing Stormbreaker—Frankie & Alice, the true-life tale of a dancer beset by multiple personality disorder, is a film that wouldn’t know personality if it slapped it in the face. By the end credits’ arrival, it’s all you can do to wish it would.
Deep inside of Harvard University, within a building called the W.E.B Du Bois institute, there is an experiment underway to create a whole new academic discipline. Inside the building is the HipHop Archive and Research Institute, a project that is trying to “encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through HipHop.”
“Fuck you” make for fitting first words in a film as fundamentally angry—in subject, if not sensibility—as Apollonian Story. They’re directed at the rock hewn by sexagenarian Nissim Kahlon, who continues to carve the house he first cut in the cliffs along Israel’s northern coastline decades priot. It’s the kind of film to benefit from a blurb read in advance; the unwitting observer’s eyes will be slowly drawn to the ornate detail of every inch, the beautiful mosaics on which the movie never deigns to linger. That’s primarily, perhaps, because it’s more concerned with Nissim’s residence as a home than a house; if it’s a unique architecture that drew directors Ilan Moscovitch and Dan Bronfeld to make this film, it’s the human structure they found within it that kept them there.