Fantasy and science fiction have always offered an incredible amount of possibility to storytelling. When you have rules and worlds you can make up and change at the whim of a keystroke it can be easy to get lost in the nuts and bolts. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. Some very good films… Read more »
Guest post by Haley Semian. Caylee So: a filmmaker, a storyteller extraordinaire, a Cambodian-American, and an overall badass human being. Caylee was born in a refugee camp in 1981, just a couple years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Her parents were of the many Cambodians fleeing a country plagued with a genocide that… Read more »
Guest post by Tyne Lowe. In the first thirty minutes of Miss Hokusai, artist O-Ei walks through Edo with her blind younger sister, O-Nao, and attempts to explain their father’s art to her. The viewer has been introduced to their father, Katsushiko Hokusai (referred to in the film as Tetsuzo), as a somewhat eccentric and… Read more »
Carlos Reygadas’ mysteriously titled Japón (2002) opens in a darkened car tunnel, and for all we know we’re in Japan (Japón’s English translation), but maybe a Japan of the future. The car taillights glow ember-red below the camera line with white orbs of tunnel light above. A motorcycle glides between stopped traffic. It’s so dark… Read more »
By now, it’s no secret among genre aficionados and admirers of Hong Kong cinema that Lau Kar-leung (1934-2013) was among the world’s finest practitioners of the martial arts film and, by extension, of the action film more broadly. Lau, a filmmaker of considerable artistic stature in his home country, is one of the more well-known… Read more »
One of the things that the notorious film and theater artist Rainer Werner Fassbinder was famous for was his productivity. He created dozens of feature films, several for television, at least three miniseries, and wrote 24 plays. Fassbinder had the type of career where an 8-hour miniseries such as Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day… Read more »