The TCM Classic Festival screening of Raw Deal (1948) left a large number of hopeful audience members shut out (the fact that there were still empty seats for Love Story across the way was no consolation). Part of the teething process for a festival that seems to double in attendance each year, but one that […]
Film Festival
TCM Classic Film Festival: The Macomber Affair (1947)
The collected works of Ernest Hemingway are popular for cinematic adaptation. One of the lesser known, and only adapted once for the screen, is Hemingway’s novel “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber”. In 1947, Director Zoltan Korda, of the famous Korda family, brought The Macomber Affair to the big screen with the legendary Gregory […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: Alps (Dir. Giogos Lanthimos, 2011, Greece)
Giorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth caused quite a splash last year, so many were eager to see what queasy weirdness his latest would offer. Alps is barely less weird, somewhat less queasy, and just as opaque. Even more than his last film, it also teeters on the verge of being merely affected. A big crash of […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: Faust (Dir. Alexandr Sokurov, 2011, Russia)
Sokurov concludes his Moloch trilogy, on evil and power, with a loose adaptation of Faust. So loose, in fact that one would be hard-pressed to recognize anything of the original save the name of the protagonist. He’s still a doctor, but poor, neurotic, and, after a while, fixated with a very young girl named Margarete. […]
AFI FEST 2011 Film Review: Headhunters (Dir. Morten Tyldum, 2011, Norway)
A rather appealing if throwaway cat and mouse thriller, Headhunters introduces us immediately to the forcefully charming persona and slick art-thievery methods of its protagonist, Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie). His criminal activities subsidize a career as über-successful corporate headhunter, but he makes no bones about having overextended himself for the sake of his Nordic model-beautiful […]