With a name like The Titfield Thunderbolt, the director of A Fish Called Wanda (1988), and the same studio that made gems like The Ladykillers (1955) and Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), there’s the understandable feeling that this film really...
As a critic, one of the most interesting aspects of watching the nominated short films, of any variety, is the growing awareness of a thematic strain, a little something that comes up again and again, as if the films themselves...
John Woo belongs to that worldwide pantheon of legendarily cool directors achieving international notoriety at the end of the 90s, reworking classic Hollywood tropes and genres to create something that, despite those antecedents, feels almost entirely original. But, before bullet...
It’s so straightforward, it’s disarming. A group of people sit around a table somewhere in Israel, some Jewish Israelis, others Germans or Austrians, all too young to remember the history they’re trying to reckon with and yet forced to reckon...
The act of looking back, of examining the past, is a key feature of human consciousness and arguably the primary function of art itself–to render a narrative so we can understand ourselves. As we look back over an incredibly violent...
Film about the oppression of women throughout history and in society is so common now as to be almost its own genre, transcending historical fiction, biopic, epic, fantasy, drama, all of which occupy only a portion of its territory, from...
One of the most fascinating aspects of cinematic history is how often key elements of second run and B studio products are later appropriated by mainstream studios in billion dollar movies, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Hammer Studios, a British B...
No, this is not the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme adaptation of the famous video game series. We don’t even get a Ryu cameo, though I guess expecting characters not yet created would be rather unreasonable. This trio of films, kicked...
Ideally, animation showcases the best of what cinema as an art form has to offer – unmoored from the typical physical and monetary limits, the camera sees what it will, constrained only by the imagination of the filmmaker. In a...
At the start of the early James Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah (1965), filmed in a long tracking shot over a beautiful, ornate table laden with food, a Maharajah (Utpal Dutt), at ease amongst the riches of his palace, relays to...
