The British Film Institute’s 56th London Film Festival has just closed with its new director, Australian Clare Stewart, shaking it up with some of the strategies she introduced in her five-year tenure at the Sydney Film Festival. Based on her first LFF, Stewart’s committed to increasing accessibility, expanding the audience, and enhancing the festival’s national […]
With two extra screens at its disposal, the New York Film Festival has added more sidebars to its programming, which means additional events have been packed into its 17 days. It was once possible to see a generous slice of what the festival had to offer. Now it’s an uphill battle just to see many […]
At first glance, this year’s New York Film Festival is almost unrecognizable—a departure from its slimmer, more restrictive, and less glitzy programming of only a few years ago. What was once a small, curated festival has expanded, thanks to more screening space, but also perhaps due to an organizational objective to wedge itself as a […]
South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s monochromatic, blood-soaked Jacobean tale of revenge and forgiveness, Pieta, won the Golden Lion award last weekend during a chaotic awards ceremony televised live on the RAI Cinema channel. It triumphed over several richer films, like Ulrich Seidl’s comedy of cruelty, Paradise: Faith, and Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (far from […]
I don’t want to say that the European auteur film has hit a dry spell (although it did cross my mind), but many such films either fell flat or seemed too familiar in the opening six days of this year’s Venice Film Festival—at least nine were all-out disappointments. Thankfully, three films, all from the Middle […]
Now in its 11th edition, this year’s New York Asian Film Festival is a little lighter than usual on the fanboy-baiting genre material, such as martial arts, horror, action, and the outré Japanese sex and gore imports, its usual bread and butter. But to this critic’s mind, that is all to the good, in terms […]
Surprising heroes persevere against complicated villains at the 23rd annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. The 16 films from 12 countries are presented around themes and strategies related to the work of the international advocacy organization. Cinematically, the films primarily use two storytelling styles: the struggle of […]
This year’s Open Roads: New Italian Cinema opens on the same weekend in New York as Alice Rohrwacher’s audacious debut, Corpo Celeste. Through the perplexed eyes of a 12-year-old girl on the verge of her confirmation, the director questions what it means to be a Christian and the values of contemporary Italians, who are out […]
This year, New Directors/New Films shakes up its usual art house lineup a little bit. The 41st edition jumps on the animated 3D bandwagon with The Rabbi’s Cat and steps into the grindhouse with a kill-a-thon from Indonesia, The Raid: Redemption. In what is another first, a surprise selection closes the series on April […]