“For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thoughts that once we had. Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad” — Christina Rossetti CalArts Professor and film essayist Thom Andersen, acclaimed for his 2003 documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” has brought his latest…
There are more coming-of-age films than masterpieces in the Louvre, but there are only a handful of them that have stood the test of time, even though teen-speak changes over the years. First-time Canadian director Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant, an update of the short that won the youth jury prize at Locarno International Film Festival…
“Life can be tragic, but let’s not snivel” — Gustav Mahler Alix Delaporte’s (“Angel & Tony”) The Last Hammer Blow (Le dernier coup de marteau) is the story of 14-year Victor (Romain Paul, in an outstanding debut performance that earned him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival) who…
Driving is an androgynous slob. Could be a woman, a man or a mime — she actually looks like Marcel Marceau without makeup. It’s raining, drizzling over her windshield, drops that produce a mud the wipers intermittently splatter onto her sight. When she arrives where she was going to, we watch her leaving her car,…
William Shakespeare wrote (Sonnet 116), “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.” Though Shakespeare would not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, Kate and Geoff Mercer in Andrew…
Imagine a world where demons share human cities. We never see them, but they see us, surround us, interact with us and depend upon us, while all the time hating us and viewing us with contempt. Such is the premise of Fire City: End of Days, the feature debut from Tom Woodruff Jr. It is…
Making a movie that feels both realistic and satisfyingly entertaining is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the notion of producing a film that feels entirely true to life is almost antithetical to the cinematic framework. Life is often uncomfortable, random, ambiguous and inconsequential — traits that could understandably be seen as detriments…
