• The few movies that have been made about the electronic dance music scene in the last twenty years have come and gone like mere blips and blops, in part because of weak plots and sub-plot and bad casting choices but also because techno, like drugs or sex, tends to make for boring on-screen subject matter. Movies about music need to have vivid characters that jump off the screen, like those in Cameron Crowe's 2000's ALMOST FAMOUS.

  • 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

  • CANNES, France - The Croisette has been awash in semen since the midnight premiere screening of the new Gaspar Noé film LOVE. The director of ENTER THE VOID and I STAND ALONE said during a sparsely-attended press conference today that he submitted the film to fest a week after the April selection announcement. That this was going to be in 3D was a mystery, even to the filmmaker. Vincent Maraval of Wild Bunch (one of the film’s co-producers) had told him “you should get into 3D” after the success of James Cameron’s AVATAR. What started as a joke between them gained traction and eventually became reality.