Latest Posts

Why the Foreign Oscars Need to be Blown Up

Commentary

Garbage In Garbage Out, or Why the Foreign Oscars Need to be Blown Up

By ROBERT KOEHLER

Computer programmers have a term for the risk flawed data input poses to the goal of good data results: Garbage In, Garbage Out. No four words better sum up the profound problems that have turned the foreign-language Oscar category into a sad, pathetic joke. When the head of the executive committee overseeing the Oscarís foreign categoryóthat would be widely-respected producer Mark Johnsonólooks at you directly, as he did to me while we rode a shuttle bus during this yearís Sundance, and tells you …

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Animation industry

Commentary

The estimable Animation World Magazine offers an excellent article on Persepolis‘ lack of exposure from Sony. The author doesn’t make any points that a lot of us haven’t been making for years, but it’s great to see more articles like this in popular industry trades/sites. It’s also well written, offering gems such as this:

“On the other hand, audiences are treated (on two screens at most
multiplexes) to the lowest examples of swill dished out by Hollywood.
While Persepolis struggles to be shown in the smallest of art film
houses, National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is smeared like

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Bluebeard’s Castle

Film review

Now that serial killer musicals are back in fashion, LACMA’s screening last Fridayof Michael Powell’s rarely seen Bluebeard’s Castle (1964)–with Powell’s widow and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance–seems especially appropriate. Made for West German TV in the doldrums of Powell’s post-Peeping Tom (1960) blacklisting, it’s a startlingly expressionist, one-act, one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok’s sole opera (with lyrics by film theorist Bela Balazs).

The producer/star Norman Foster (who should not be confused with the Hollywood actor/director of the same name, and whose widow recently approved distribution of the film with Powell’s summary subtitles) plays the mythological duke; …

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A new issue of Beyond magazine

Site news


The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926)

“Now that rampaging dinosaurs, epic catastrophes, and superheroes have become ubiquitous in movies, animation seems as commonplace as news footage. But animation is as old photography itself; it predates ‘motion pictures’ through a variety of Victorian contraptions. And its practitioners were often the most solitary and obsessive filmmakers–visionaries who painstakingly granted the illusion of life to an astonishing array of materials, and devoted years of labor to producing a few moments of flickering movement. Animators are cinemaís original Frankensteins. . . .”

The new issue of the Utne-nominated ads-free indie …

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Film Comment mention

Site news

It’s always nice to see one’s name in print–from the latest Film Comment:

“Launched in 2001, Masters of Cinema is run by an eclectic group hailing from the U.S., Canada and England: Jan Bielawski, Doug Cummings, R. Dixon Smith, Trond S. Tronsen, and Nick Wrigley. So which masters tie this collective together? Many celebrated auteurs, but from the beginning it seems there was one sanctified quartet: Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Dreyer. Check out the eminently useful worldwide DVD release calendar posted on the sharply designed home page and explore four years’ worth of DVD of the Year readers’ polls. …

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Robert Koehler’s Best of 2007

Commentary, Film review


In the City of Sylvia

THE FILMS OF 2007

By ROBERT KOEHLER

This is a long list because it was a great year. And it was a great year because weíre in the midst of a new golden age for world cinemaóof which this list is submitted as proof. And because this list is long, Iíll be brief. 2007 was the year that ushered in the greatest film of the new centuryóJose Luis Guerinís combined film and video meditation on what it is to be an artist, to be a lover, to see and to listen otherwise known as Dans …

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