Sin Nombre is at least the third small film I’ve seen recently about people trying to cross the Mexican-American border, with varying degrees of success (including Biblical-style tale of rivalry and deceit, Sangre de mi sangre, and the more maudlin but still tearjerky La misma luna). It’s a zeitgeisty issue for obvious reasons, and though […]
This spate of small essays on the topic of filmmakers distributing their own films by whatever means was born in a recent flurry of Twitter exchanges about the question. What are the boundaries of self-promotion? What is the relationship between audience and distribution? How do festivals shape the production of cinema? These aren’t questions that […]
In this essay, Bruce Herman reflects upon the relationships between sacrifice and beauty in his own paintings and in contemporary art.
I remember the day I opened my mailbox and found a pamphlet about a half-inch thick from James Dobson’s organization, filled with elaborate warnings about why I should not see Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ. Then I saw the film and it moved me powerfully, inspiring me to consider what Christ, being […]
Film Studies For Free has been a favorite blog for a while precisely because of announcements like this. Starzmedia, one of Herzog’s key distributors, has posted eight of Herzog’s early and mid-career films on YouTube. These include the well seen Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, Little Deiter Needs to Fly, Woyzeck, and My Best Fiend – but also […]
In Treeless Mountain, two sisters feel their way forward through that limbo between innocence and premature knowledge, between a child’s dreams and nightmares.
Reha Erdem’s celebrated 2006 film Times and Winds weaves together stories of two boys, Ömer and Yakup, and a girl named Yildiz — pre-teens caught between heaven and earth, wonder and suffering.
If you’re in New York for the Tribeca festival, IndieWire points out ten to watch at Tribeca.
Nicholas Ansell looks at the doctrine of hell in contemporary evangelicalism using John Stott’s view of hell as a point of critical reflection on the subject