Tag: film
The 100 Greatest Australian Films: Cinema Down Under
Why write a list of the 100 greatest Australian films? While recently browsing through a book on the history of Australian cinema, it occurred to me that most Australian film buffs and cinephiles actually have a very limited concept of the nation’s cinematic output. Except for those films that first garner significant positive attention internationally,…
A History of the Found Footage Film: The Good, the Bad, and the Box Art
It has been fifteen years since The Blair Witch Project, and the found footage genre has settled into a bit of a rut. It is a very restrictive form, best suited to horror and suspense, and most filmmakers discover eventually that it would be nice to break away from the central conceit that everything the…
Living on the Edge: ‘The Last Patrol’ Offers a Sobering Post-War Trip
It’s hard to call Sebastian Junger’s compelling new documentary, The Last Patrol (2014), an anti-war film … or, for that matter, a pro-war movie. That’s in part because this picture, which kicked off the American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film Festival Thursday night, is too textured to peg in a specific hole. The…
Flight of Fancy: ‘Birdman’ Worth Taking Off With, Despite Flaws
Virtuoso filmmaking by Alejandro González Iñárritu. A bravura, Oscar-worthy performance by Michael Keaton. Innovative, feels-like-one-take cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. You’d think that with all those ingredients, Birdman, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) would be an instant masterpiece, pushing director Iñárritu into a very select group of celluloid heroes. Indeed, there are moments in the…
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash: The Darkness of Artistic Ambition
2014 still has a couple more months to go and some big, well-regarded movies are soon to be released. They will have to go a long way to surpass Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which is head and shoulders above anything that has been widely released thus far. Of all its outstanding qualities, this is what makes…