Time to dust off the Frantz Fanon reader. Colonialism, as well as Africa, its oil, gold and religion are the ambiguous motifs this new documentary film slated for release next week aims to confronts. For WE COME AS FRIENDS filmmaker Hubert Sauper swooped down into the context of his story, literally. He and his crew built a small aircraft especially for the film and flew it to the filming location, in South Sudan. This young nation

A comparative review of casino films pre-2000s with movies released in the new millennium suggest that this generation’s screenplay writers and directors have exhausted the genre, and the Internet’s various lists of top films in the category have not proven otherwise. The recent additions in the category have failed to impress at the box office with Jason Statham’s Wild Card, a substandard attempt to channel Burt Reynolds in Heat, as well as Runner, Runner which a Rotten Tomatoes

In THE TRIBE we're propelled head-first in a boarding school for young deaf and mute people, the tribe of the title, in which violence, trafficking and prostitution are commonplace. For the over two hours of the film's length there's not a single line of dialogue or caption, just the power of cinema to induce raw emotion through ruthless framing shots that spare us nothing and zeroes in on actors who are apparently

Ever since his first outing there in the nineties Jean-Michel Frodon, one of France’s most distinguished film specialists, traveled four more times to Iran, the country whose filmmakers gave us festival favorites like GABBEH, A TASTE OF CHERRY and CLOSE-UP. As your not-so-average tourist, at times, and as officially-summoned authority on cinema, at others, Frodon soaked up the lore and took in the sights, giving talks and trekking it

There are years when everyone knows which film will win. 2015 was not one of them, although there was some consensus among the major press that CAROL and MIA MADRE were the strongest films, cinematographically and stylistically and the Hou Hsiao-Hsien-directed THE ASSASSIN, the rare film by a filmmaker who's completely in control of his art, would not go home empty-handed. We expected the Coen Brothers-led jury would award them but not

Notwithstanding the lack of one film trailblazing the others as was the case in previous years (MOMMY or LA VIE D'ADELE, as recent examples, HOLY MOTORS a little bit earlier), 2015 has borne a tremendously-strong Cannes vintage. So yes, credit--much of it--goes to Thierry Frémaux and his team for having bravely assembled such an inventive slate of films by filmmakers who express themselves genuinely on the larger issues

CANNES, France - Defining the influences that push someone towards a career as filmmaker isn't an easy task. But where Ethiopian director Yared Zeleke is concerned two events can be said to have been defining ones: a photo he saw in the French city of Cannes fourteen years ago and his emigrating to the US with his father at age ten, a very difficult moment