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My Friend Ivan LapshinImage: International Film Exchange

When I was an undergrad in film school, one of the pillar courses was a two-semester film history class that would act as a broad survey to give us a foundation as aspiring filmmakers and workers. Naturally, this course was also about its...

Since taking over in 2022, Nifff director Pierre-Yves Walder has made the festival’s socially tinged retrospective program a hallmark of his tenure. Rounding out a so-called trilogy that started with queer representation then followed with a gender focus that put the femme fatale and scream queen under the spotlight, this year’s retrospective will tackle class conflict in cheeky terms, putting the screws to those swells with a 20 film program titled Eat the Rich.

“Genre cinema has always treated questions of predation, exploitation and everyday brutality with such complexity,” says Walder, “which makes it so interesting to how this theme evolves over the course of film history.”

The far-ranging program tackles nearly a century worth of upper-class perfidy, beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s early-Soviet sci-fi “Aelita” from 1924 and running through to Jenna Cato Bass’ South African servitude creeper “Good Madam” from 2021. In between are landmarks like Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope...

Guy Maddin’s sophomore feature, Archangel, takes place in a fantastical crossroads of history, in a hamlet in Russia so remote that the twin shocks of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution have only just reached town limits in 1919. Its plot—of a love triangle between a traumatized WWI veteran (Kyle McCulloch), the woman (Kathy Marykuca) he believes is his dead wife, and her own amnesiac husband (Ari Cohen)—offers something of a précis of narrative tropes and themes that would pervade Maddin’s cinema. There’s the juxtaposition of archaic film form with more risqué sexual exhibition, the slipperiness of memory, and a notion of projection heavily indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Nonetheless, Archangel feels more like a repository of references to the cinema of a hundred years ago than something fully imbued with Maddin’s signature idiosyncrasy. Verohnka, for one, habitually wears a spiky, chintzy crown...

This year, all the Oscar-contending directors are nominated for original screenplay: the Daniels, Todd Field, Martin McDonagh, Ruben Östlund and Steven Spielberg (writing with Tony Kushner).

This is the first time it’s happened in AMPAS history.

The only year that came close was 2017, when all five helmers had written or co-written their scripts, though they didn’t all get writing noms.

So here’s Film History 101.

In Hollywood lore, Preston Sturges is often credited as the first scribe to become a hyphenate, as writer-director of the 1940 “The Great McGinty.” But as with all Hollywood “facts,” there is only an element of truth here.

In the next few years, he was joined by some heavyweights: Orson Welles (“Citizen Kane”) and John Huston (“The Maltese Falcon”) in 1941; Leo McCarey (co-writer of “Going My Way”); Billy Wilder (writing with Raymond Chandler) for “Double Indemnity” in 1944; and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (“Dragonwyck”), 1946.

However, a writer-director wasn’t an innovation.

Adaptation and evolution are essential tools needed for any art to survive through time. Though, during its infantile existence from 1895-1915, innovators had been highly ambitious in the technical quality of filmmaking (i.e. Dw Griffith, Edwin Porter), their expression of fantasy (i.e. Georges Méliès) and the investigation into the psychological realism of the human condition (i.e. Yevgeni Bauer, Yakov Protazanov). Though there already had been many major movements in art from antiquity till the present, film was still a young process where much exploration hadn't yet occured. It was only relatively recently that photography was no longer just a tool to produce the sharpest images, but as an expression of artistic merit. Peter Emerson published Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art in 1890, which served...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

When I first saw this artwork for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis used on the Masters of Cinema 2010 Blu-ray packaging, I was convinced that it was contemporary artwork commissioned especially for that release. As familiar as I was with Heinz Schulz-Neudamm’s famous poster for the film (aka the most sought after and most expensive movie poster of all time), for some reason I had not seen this before. But when I discovered that this poster was not only an original 1927 French release poster but also that it is a four-sheet poster that stands 94 inches tall and 126 inches wide, my mind was blown. (Click on the image to see it in all its glory). Apparently an original exists in the Art Library of the Berlin State Museum (the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) but I would assume no copy has ever come up for auction. As far as I’m concerned this...

Congratulations to Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The judges have cited "his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office." And the Globe's collected his nominated reviews. "Journalism's highest honor has only been bestowed upon a film critic a few times," notes Eugene Hernandez of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. "Previous recipients include Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal in 2005, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post in 2003 and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times in 1975. 'I was just doing my job and this is what happened,' Morris offered modestly during an emotional newsroom speech that was recorded and edited for the Globe website."

In other news. Nick Catucci for Artinfo: "When we say that Abel Ferrara's Pizza Connection — a web serial for Vice now in...

SEOUL -- Korea's rival "fantastic" film festivals both announced their summer lineups in separate press conferences Tuesday. The 9th Puchon Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan) announced a 172-film slate, about half of which are short films. The fest will devote special sections to Egyptian movies, erotica and Korean filmmakers Park Chul-soo and Ko Young-nam. Meanwhile, the Seoul-based upstart Real Fantastic Film Festival (RealFanta) -- formed by the former leadership of PiFan, fired earlier in the year -- announced a 64-film program, which will include a spotlight on Soviet science fiction titled "Marx Attacks!: Sci-Fi Movies from Eastern Europe" (jointly planned and programd with the Neuchatel Fantastic Film Festival in Switzerland). RealFanta will open with Yakov Protazanov's 1924 film Aelita, with a new score added by Song Hyun-joo.