Category: Cinema
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Interview: Director Linda Olte on Sisters
Of the 10 films I saw at the Boston Baltic Film Festival, Sisters will probably be the first I return to when it (hopefully) hits streaming one day. If my recommendation means anything to you, there are still a few days to catch it on the festival’s site. A touching adolescent drama about the Latvian adoption system and…
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Dispatch #5: Mariupolis 2, Accidental Santa
The Boston Baltic Film Festival ran in-person from Friday, 3/3 through Sunday, 3/5 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and will continue virtually through 3/19. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage! “Also, I got gas poisoning,” one father says to his family, in a context where something…
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Interview: Director Uģis Olte on Upurga
The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs from Friday, 3/3 through Sunday, 3/5 at the Emerson Paramount Center, and through 3/19 virtually. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage! In one of my favorite films from the festival, Uģis Olte’s feature debut Upurga features a group…
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Dispatch #4: Melchior the Apothecary, Melchior the Apothecary: The Ghost
Poised detective yarns, these old-fashioned populist films are designed to maximize the emotional enjoyment of large audiences while also allowing space for virtue veneration and development.
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Dispatch #3: Sisters, January
Sisters is one of the festival’s most essential films.
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Dispatch #2: Neon Spring, Tree of Eternal Life
Fortunately for Laine, and undermining the meteorological skills of Punxsutawney Phil, winter doesn’t last forever.
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Past Sins and Failed Dreams in Creed III
Dramatics suffer in favor of action and style in Michael B. Jordan’s stylish directorial debut, Creed III, which is basically a pay-per-view title match with the best (and longest) narrative pre-show ever conceived. But make no mistake: you’re here for the match, not the backstory-loaded pre-show. It’s been long decided that boxing is the most cinematic…
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Boston Baltic Film Festival Dispatch #1: Upurga, Kalev
Sometimes we find memorable images in the wrong places.
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Interview: Director SJ Finlay on Boy From Nowhere
Shot on a micro-budget with essentially a one-man crew on the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines, the Canadian-Filipino co-production Boy From Nowhere is the closest we will ever get to a smaller-scale brainchild of Steven Soderbergh’s Che and Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Beasts of No Nation. Like Fukunaga’s acclaimed film, writer and director (and cinematographer) SJ Finlay’s Boy From Nowhere converges…
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Love Under Capitalism in Comrades, Almost a Love Story
“It was winter and cold and we were two lonely people keeping each other warm.” One of the great Hong Kong romances, director Peter Chan doesn’t consider his own Comrades, Almost a Love Story (1996) to be a romantic film. Here’s his response to a South China Morning Post 2021 question asking him to describe…
The Transcendent Cinema 