OFCS members don’t just write film reviews. Here are several articles you might find interesting.
Best of Lists
Dark Times: Top 20 Film Noir
Caio Bogoni @ Cine Grandiose [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Sex, crime, corruption and immorality. An acid take of mankind’s darker side in the best film noir of all time.
The 10 Best Movies of 2018 (So Far)
Alex Brannan @ CineFiles Reviews
- Excerpt:
Interviews
‘American Koko’ star Diarra Kilpatrick dishes on working with Viola Davis
Candice Frederick @ AM New York
Bart Layton and the cast of American Animals
Amber Wilkinson @ Eye For Film
Eye Haïdara about C’est La Vie!
Amber Wilkinson @ Eye For Film
Filmmaker Ben Cresciman and “Sun Choke”
Betty Jo Tucker @ Movie Addict Headquarters
- Excerpt: Ben Cresciman discusses his psychological thriller, “Sun Choke,” a perfect melding of style and substance.
Insight with Filmmaker Qingge Gao
Jeremy Dyson, Co-Director of Ghost Stories
Joao Pinto @ Portal Cinema [English / Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Portal Cinema had a great talk with Jeremy Dyson, the co-director of the British horror filme of the moment: Ghost Stories
Joan Steiger: Her Showbiz Memoir
Betty Jo Tucker @ Movie Addict Headquarters
- Excerpt: Joan Benedict Steiger (Rod Steiger’s widow) visits Movie Addict Headquarters to discuss her fascinating memoir, “Brooklyn Baby: A Hollywood Star’s Amazing Journey through Love, Loss & Laughter”
Paco Plaza, Famous Spanish Director of REC or Veronica
Joao Pinto @ Portal Cinema [English / Portuguese]
- Excerpt: It was a pleasure for Portal Cinema to sit down and talk a little bit with Paco Plaza, the famous Spanish Director that brought us the horror movie icon “REC”.
Festivals: General Coverage
Dave Made a Maze
- Excerpt: Finish what you start
SIR
- Excerpt: The love that dare not speak its class
The Song of Sway Lake
- Excerpt: Living between the grooves of scratch
Tributes
Burt Reynolds (1936-2018): More Gator than Gable
- Excerpt: As Entertainment Editor for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, I crossed paths with the star a bunch of times, starting with the Atlanta sendoff of the first “Smoky and the Bandit” and including the gala opening of the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter.
Essays
“Black Panther”, “Crazy Rich Asians”, and American Dreaming in 2018…
Darren Mooney @ the m0vie blog
- Excerpt: Films like “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” reveal a lot about how America sees itself in 2018.
Documentary Filmmaking in 2018: From Hagiography To Bisbee ‘17
Joshua Brunsting @ The CriterionCast
Edge of Eternity (1959)
Roderick Heath @ This Island Rod
- Excerpt: The pulp-poetic title Edge of Eternity vividly describes both the physical landscape, the soaring vantages and yawning deep of the canyon, and the otherworldly, the ever-so-faintly dreamy quality Siegel manages to imbue upon an elemental drama…
Family Plot (1976)
Roderick Heath @ This Island Rod
- Excerpt: In spite of the relaxed attitude, too, Family Plot nonetheless builds to dazzling little spasms of intense cutting…
Fear is a place: SESSION 9’s Gothic Madness in Uncanny Places
C.H. Newell @ Father Son Holy Gore
- Excerpt: The nebulous concept of fear somehow occupies a palpable place in people’s everyday lives. In big cities, fear is capable of touching people in a direct way often due to its physicality via specific locations.
Funny Games: Confront Yourself
C.H. Newell @ Father Son Holy Gore
- Excerpt: Michael Haneke’s 1997 Funny Games was the auteur’s self-confessed artistic expression of the effects of media violence on real people, real life. Even with the director explaining his intentions, there’s more underneath.
The Mistreatment of Women and Christian Misogyny in MOTHER!
C.H. Newell @ Father Son Holy Gore
- Excerpt: Right from the opening shots of mother! it’s abundantly clear this film is a surreal piece of cinema. Not sure what anyone would expect from Darren Aronofsky, whose most conventional films are even odd in their own rights.
The Searchers (1956)
Roderick Heath @ Film Freedonia
- Excerpt: When the door closes on Ethan, much as it found him, it closes not just upon the character and his embodiment of the Western hero cut off from the settling world, but upon an entire concept of the genre, perhaps even the genre itself.
Taking Back the Night with Ms. 45: Gendered Fear in City Spaces
C.H. Newell @ Father Son Holy Gore
- Excerpt: Ms. 45 is a gritty, nasty little exploitation flick. It’s also centred on how city life is rife with dangerously gendered spaces.
Thoughts on The Academy Awards’ Changes
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Excerpt: Each decision the Academy has taken: moving up the presentation in 2020, cutting awards to commercial breaks, and ‘Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film’ are motivated to bring up sagging ratings. None of them, however, addresses what truly ails the Academy Awards.
Reviews of Short Films
Insanium
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
Other Types of Articles
The French Connection (1971): A Review
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Excerpt: Intense, intelligent, with at least two excellent chase sequences and a methodology to both the criminals and the detectives, The French Connection excels on all fronts.
The Gorgeous Hussy: A Review
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Excerpt: I think where The Gorgeous Hussy went wrong was in the casting of Crawford as our ‘gorgeous hussy’. It’s as if she was put-off by all the costuming, and that unease seeped into her performance.
Oliver! (1968): A Review
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Excerpt: Oliver! to my mind is the weakest musical to win Best Picture. It’s actually also to my mind one of the weakest Best Picture winners.
Prayers to a Consumer God: American Decay & Ideological Control in THEY LIVE
C.H. Newell @ Father Son Holy Gore
- Excerpt: Using the premise of the short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, Carpenter eviscerates American consumerism and materialism, Reaganomics, as well as questions the vast class divide which exists in most American cities. The best part about They Lives is it could genuinely have been made this year and it’d barely need updating.
A Special Day: A Review
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Texan Reviews
- Excerpt: A Special Day is a very quiet film, and a very moving one.
This Is Our Land
- Excerpt: This is Our Land is more a politcal fable crossed with an old-fashioned melodrama than it is a dramatic film in the modern sense, but that’s not a complaint.
The Tree Of Life – Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review
- Excerpt: The Criterion Collection has been very good to Terrence Malick over the years, and that continues to show with this terrific release of The Tree of Life.
