Brazilian filmmakers sometimes cast a punishing gaze toward the social ills of their country. It's a feat of uninhibited self-examination that can make the viewer unsettled but also subdued by the beauty and mystery of this country, the directness of the image and the stirring tales of woes encountered by the characters who populate them. Starting tomorrow and running through to May 18th the ... more >
Archives for March 2015
ARCHIVES
In one hundred films, BRAZILIAN CINEMA highlighted at French cinémathèque
Films by Glauber Rocha and Esmir Filho to be on offer
OPINION: Does IMDB suffer from lazyitis?
"IMDB" is one of the top five hundred visited sites
It was ranked 27th by Alexa
IMDB’s External reviews page is conceivably the most complete index of film reviews in the history of computer-literate mankind. It's almost the most neglected one. Anyone who's needed to look up information about a film knows that External Reviews is it, a high-affluence destination where film critics post their point of view about any given film. But I'm guessing that more than a few people ... more >
The lonely and extraordinary life, as highlighted in THE SALT OF THE EARTH
Country of production: France / Brazil / Italy
Runtime: 110 mins (Dolby Digital)
Beautiful, heartbreaking, ambitious, and spiritually invigorating. “The Salt of the Earth,” a new documentary directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, gives social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado (the co-director’s father) center stage and illuminates his life’s work with a focus on his photography work and travels. Salgado’s photographs cover diverse subjects, from ... more >
DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER ALBERT MAYSLES PASSES ON
(November 26, 1926 – March 5, 2015)
Albert Maysles, who was one of the first documentary filmmakers to use hand-held cameras to spontaneously record the lives of both the famous and the unknown, has died. He was 88. In a statement, Maysles' family said the director passed away after a brief battle with cancer at his New York home Thursday night. Follow Screen Comment on Twitter during the Cannes Festival (May 13-24). Watch our ... more >
An erratic but underwhelming “Chappie” hit theater screens
Low marks for Blomkamp's latest effort
Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel and Hugh Jackman
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
The opening of Neill Blomkamp’s “Chappie” sweeps across multiple stories in multiple places in early stage apocalypse-Johannesburg, South Africa. A helicopter fleet of robocops dives from the sky and blasts through a collection of menacing gangsters. It’s a lovely, frantic movement of action, editing and scoring. And then everything goes wrong after that. It’s common for critics to wish that ... more >
Time-tested franchises are making a comeback
The seventies, eighties and nineties are back
The eighties, what an awesome decade. M.J. was the king of pop, "Egyptian lover" was rocking the airwaves and Bill Cosby was everyone’s favorite grand-daddy. What a difference thirty years makes. A wave of something is sweeping through the film industry and a glut of sequels inspired by the seventies’, eighties’ and nineties’ most famous franchises is looming large. Is it nostalgia or a lack ... more >