Category: Film review

Co-directors Shih-Ching Tsou and Sean Baker (whose Prince of Broadway earned him best narrative feature at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this year) are in town this week for the theatrical release of their 2004 DV production, Take Out. It’s a powerful example of guerilla filmmaking with a commitment to the rhythms and social fluxes of urban life, as well as to the quiet human costs and virtues teeming at its core. Tsou and Baker effectively formed a two-person crew, and they camped out for a month at a busy Chinese take out restaurant in the Upper West …

2008 has turned out to be something of a watershed for longtime Terence Davies fans like myself; not only has the BFI finally released his visually and aurally astonishing British works on region-2 DVDs with commentaries and interviews, but Davies has also completed his first film in eight years: Of Time and the City.  Fortunately, it’s showing all week in Los Angeles as part of DocuWeek, a program of films the International Documentary Association is screening in commercial theaters to qualify them for Academy Award nominations.

Of Time and the City is Davies’ first documentary, and it’s a …

The news that one of America’s greatest film critics, Manny Farber, has passed away is triggering deserved tributes (well-documented by David Hudson at GreenCine Daily), so I feel it’s a good a time as any to remember Christopher Petit’s 1999 essay film/meditation on Farber, itself titled Negative Space (the title of Farber’s reissued and expanded compendium).

Petit has a history of biographical tributes to filmmakers, and given the dearth of films about the critical process or its practitioners, Negative Space is a welcome 39-minute tribute. For the same reason, it’s also a bit frustrating–given the privileged occasion, does Petit …

Given the pervasiveness of prequels, it’s not so unusual that French director Philippe Ramos’ second feature imagines the early life of Moby Dick‘s dark, enigmatic Captain Ahab. (Melville provides scant backstory himself, but alludes to Ahab’s orphaned childhood and late marriage.) But Captain Ahab (which won Best Director and a FIPRESCI award at Locarno last year) is far from the typical plot-in-reverse exploitation of popular narrative; conceived as a tribute to mid-19th century Americana (particularly Romanticism and Mark Twain), it’s a personal meditation on childhood, nature, and fate. Like the book, Ramos presents his protagonist through the eyes of …