"We wanted to change history, but destiny led us to this strange sensation of uncertainty and defeat. What did we do wrong? What mistakes did we make?"--Sergio Bitar, Dawson Island prisoner, and author of Isla 10. "I felt like... More >>

Best known in horror circles as a producer on All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, Chad Feehan is doing it all on upcoming psychological horror film Wake.  Serving as writer-director-producer on the film, Feehan is currently prepping for his...

Who hasn't heard about the meteoric rise to notoriety of Xavier Dolan, the Québécois teenager whose first feature film J'ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother, 2009) received--not only an eight-minute standing ovation at the 2009 Cannes Film... More >>

Of the documentary selections for the 2010 SXSW Film Festival one of the most immediately intriguing is Alexandre Philippe's The People Vs George Lucas.  A look into the world of the man who created Star Wars and the people...

It seems like you can't go to a film festival anywhere these days without national cinemas ending up in some kind of political stand-off. Whether or not one believes that a film festival is the proper venue to broker... More >>

Along with The Over the Hill Band and Altiplano, the third Belgian feature I caught at PSIFF10 was Felix Van Groeningen's The Misfortunates (2009), Belgium's official submission to the Academy Awards® foreign language category. Though it did not make... More >>

[Our thanks again to Splice director Vincenzo Natali for an inside look at his Sundance experience.  He checks in here with his final word from the festival.]A few days have passed since the last entry. The feverish pace of...

[With Cordell Barker's Runaway screening at Sundance, we present again the interview with Barker I conducted at the Toronto International Film Festival.]One of the most acclaimed animators in Canada, the only complaint about director Cordell Barker is he just...

"The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice."--Martin Luther King, Jr. As Claudia Llosa indicated in her Q&A session at the PSIFF10 screening of La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009), a book entitled Entre... More >>

[We welcome back Splice director Vincenzo Natali with the fourth entry in his ongoing Sundance diary.]Twenty-four hours has morphed into forty-eight since my last post. Splice received its midnight premiere on Friday and since then the festival has become...

The quiet has ended. Sundance is running on all cylinders. I sit shotgun while Cynthia Amsden, Splice's courageous publicist, tears up Park City streets in her sporty Kia rental. The GPS spits out directions with the mellifluous voice pattern...

Sundance is now upon us, which means it is time for Splice director Vincenzo Natali to check in with the second entry in his record of the festival experience.Making a film is always a long and arduous process. In...

Peruvian director Claudia Llosa's sophomore feature La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009) stars Magaly Solier--with whom she worked on Madeinusa (2005)--and addresses the fears of abused women during Peru's recent history. It won both the Golden Bear... More >>

It seems that every 10-15 years Jacques Tati is reintroduced to the American moviegoing public. The last wave was in the late '90s when the recently-restored color print of Jour de Fête (1949)--Tati's first directorial feature--traveled the art house... More >>

Now that Rick Jacobson's cleavage-laden bubblegum-cult film Bitch Slap has landed in the larger American film markets, it seems like the right time to post up a conversation I had with one of the leading ladies a short while after...

San Francisco's Berlin & Beyond Film Festival would have been the venue where I imagine San Franciscans might have had the opportunity to catch Matthias Emcke's debut feature Phantomschmerz (Phantom pain, 2009); but as that film festival is still reeling... More >>

There is an intimate scene in Oscar Ruiz Navia's debut feature Crab Trap (El Vuelco del Cangrejo, 2009) that reveals the true translation of the film's title. Daniel, a "white" stranger, has drifted into the Afro-Colombian coastal village of La... More >>

Since first writing up Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète (A Prophet) at this year's Toronto International--where it arrived fresh from its Grand Prix win at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival--the film has secured numerous nominations and awards, including (most recently)... More >>

From a wry documentary exploring anti-Semitism (Defamation, 2009), The Evening Class shifts to a stylish feature that wickedly flaunts Jewish stereotypes. OSS 117: Lost in Rio saw its Bay Area premiere on Halloween night as part of the San... More >>

The man with the most famous circumflex in Australian filmmaking - and the bane of sub-editors everywhere - David Michôd, bounced back into headlines again last week with the news that not one - but two - of his feature...

[With his latest directorial effort, Splice, due to take its North American bow at the 2010 Sundance Festival, Vincenzo Natali has graciously agreed to give an insider's view of the festival experience with an exclusive series of festival diaries...

Seattle-based journalist Jay Kuehner introduced the screening of Liverpool. "I was told to keep it to five words," he quipped, "so: distant, remote, vodka....?" Kuehner opined that Liverpool consolidates one of the most thematically strong trilogies seen from the... More >>

As Jay Kuehner assesses for Parallax View: "Fantasma, per its title, coyly and spectrally endeavors to bring together the principal 'non-actors' of his previous films to Buenos Aires, to the fabled Teatro San Martín, for--what else?--a retrospective of Alonso's... More >>

Introducing Los Muertos, Northwest Film Forum Program Director Adam Sekuler offered that Lisandro Alonso's characters are most often playing themselves and--while the trajectory of his films don't always follow a traditional plot--they do follow the trajectory of what all... More >>

"Film must provide audiences the opportunity to discover questions."--Lisandro Alonso. La Libertad (Freedom, 2001) screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and scored nominations and wins on the film festival circuit, including the... More >>

Adam Sekular, Program Director for Seattle's Northwest Film Forum (NWFF), organized the retrospective "At the Edge of the World: the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso", which ran this past week November 11-19, 2009. All four of Alonso's films--La Libertad (2001),... More >>

Our thanks to Diva Velez for the following interviews with Ninja Assassin star and director Rain and James McTeigue.Rain The Lady Miz Diva:  Ninja Assassin is a really violent, bloody film.  Were you concerned that so much of your fan...

One of the pleasures of going to film festivals are the Q&A sessions afterwards.  If you read humour pieces regarding this aspect of the festival experience, they are often snarky little pieces about the awful questions fielded by audience... More >>

Pinning down Richard Stanley can be quite a job, whether you're talking about trying to find where he is or trying to make sense of the bewildering variety of reputations he has. He's been called a genius, a hack, an... More >>

Simone Bitton's Rachel took the bullet for Yoav Shamir's Hashmatsa / Defamation (2009), which I would have predicted to be the target of outrage at the 29th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF). By the time Defamation finally screened,... More >>