Category: Essays
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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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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…
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Thoughtful Streaming on a Budget
Netflix: $19.99 (premium). HBO Max: $14.99 (no ads). Disney Bundle: $13.99. Amazon Prime: $14.99. Paramount Plus: $10 (premium).
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Missing Shows Screenlife is Here to Stay
Screenlife is here to stay, thanks to Timur Bekmambetov. A Kazakh-Russian director and producer, Bekmambetov is responsible for what’s likely the most outstanding formal innovation in filmmaking in decades. Quite simply: he’s uncovered and propagandized a new way to present motion pictures—in which the viewer sees everything entirely through in-world (and thus, real-world) screens. Layers…
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Interview: Belmont World Film Family Festival’s Ellen Gitelman
For the first time in my tenure with the Boston Hassle, the Belmont World Film Family Festival is live and in-person (with several accessible online options). BWFFF will show 11 features, five short programs, and two workshops. From January 14-22, the festivalhas in-person showings at the New Art Center in Trio, the Majestic 7 in Watertown, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, and…
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Infernal Affairs and the Dark Night of the Soul
One thing I find displeasing about the contemporary Western cinematic landscape is its visual flakiness. The best shots of our biggest blockbusters are basically lifeless realizations of pre-vis. The images just aren’t memorable. The whole “One Perfect Shot” phenomenon is remarkably ironic given how many of the contemporary shots that trend on these social media…
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In the Mood for Love Approaches the Canon
I’ll never understand completionist critics. It’s better, they would have it, to see 10 unique films than only eight unique films with two re-watches littered in the mix. There are so many movies that it would be a waste to spend your precious waking minutes revisiting old film friends. In the most extreme and (in)famous…
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My Top Ten Films of 2022
Damn, it was a good year for the movies. 2022 was my best year with new releases since at least 2018, if not longer. The gleeful time-travel Japanese comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, produced in 2020 but not released on US streaming until 2022, was particularly painful to leave off, and I thought Tom Cruise would…
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story Deserves Your Attention
Picture this: you’re halfway through a theatrical showing of Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and the screen begins to flicker with a green overlay on the borders of characters and other moving objects. An easily identifiable digital projection error. Obviously, parts of people shouldn’t be flickering in green. The projectionist even pauses the film for a…
The Transcendent Cinema 