This debut feature from Paul Harrill has been getting a lot of press. Jeffrey Overstreet mentioned it in his Top Ten for 2014. Justin Chang wrote it up for Variety. Christianity Today posted an interview with Harrill. The NY Times featured it last week as a Critic’s Pick. And Darren Hughes hosted an insightful interview […]
There is a series of shots in Selma that called to mind a passage from Perez’s The Material Ghost. In this section, Perez is talking about the shot reverse shot convention. “The shot/reverse shot does not give us a bystander’s view: it has us stand in turn where each character stands.That people engaged in conversation will […]
I watched this quiet miracle of a film recently with my daughter. We have been taking painting lessons together, learning how to blend color, the tonal habits of different brushes, and little techniques artists use to paint things like clouds or shrubs. This made the film a real pleasure for us both, as Takahata’s animation is […]
Welcome to a new monthly post we will be putting together here at Filmwell. As streaming video and VOD releases have become an essential part of the cinephile diet, keeping an eye on new releases can be a daunting task. In these posts, I hope to separate some of the wheat from the chaff as titles […]
It is that time of the year when with a heave and a sigh I launch my top ten list out among all the others, knowing that mere moments from clicking “publish” it will feel like a flimsy record of a really interesting year in cinema. I had more than usual titles floating around near […]
I am not sure what A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night actually is. It emerges from the recent crop of vampire films cloaked in a lot of little genre hooks, but then defies easy description once fully unleashed. It is also undeniably beautiful, even alluring. It takes place in Bad City, an Iranian town bordered by […]
In 1989, Fukuyama declared the “end of history” in the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Norte begins with a similar mouthful, kicked about by Fabian and his law school colleagues as they muse over beers about class and inequity in the current Philippines’ economy. This theme of ideology […]
From Andrew David, Managing Editor. I’ve started my wife on the first season of The Wire. If you recall, there’s an episode where, after a mild bit of provocation, a white detective on the Baltimore police force pistol-whips a young black kid. When the detective’s commanding officer, a black man, arrives on the scene, he […]
The following is an expansion of a Twitter-conversation the three authors–Ryan Holt, Evan Cogswell, and Nathanael Booth–had shortly after seeing Gone Girl. Spoilers should be assumed. Introduction: Expectations and First Impressions Ryan: David Fincher and I have not always gotten along. For me, The Game and The Social Network rank among the best films […]