f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani is an elegant little film, and one of the most emotionally resonant movies I’ve seen this year. Based on a story by the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami that was published in the New Yorker in 2002, the characters and narrative are so lightly sketched, the film’s gravity sneaks up [...]

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In this age of global communication, we think of the world as getting smaller, but then a documentary like the BBC’s A State of Mind (distributed theatrically in the US by Kino International) comes along and offers a glimpse into one of the most industrialized but closed societies on earth, and it’s like discovering life [...]

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I don’t often blog about one of my ongoing ventures, the Masters of Cinema Series DVD collection that I’m quite proud to be associated with, distributed by Eureka Video in the UK. Part of me doesn’t want to confuse Filmjourney with any commercial promotions (any MoC reviews I would write could be tainted with [...]

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So the Toronto International Film Festival announced its line-up of films today, and those of us who will be attending can hardly contain our excitement. Of course, Girish and I have already started complaining that the new films by, say, Denis, Bujalski, Aoyama, Tian, Allen, and Hong weren’t included. (Time to order that [...]

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This weekend, the International Documentary Association began screening its DocuWeek program (not “festival,” they were quick to emphasize) so the films could qualify for Oscar nominations next year by playing in a commercial theater in Los Angeles. Whatever, I’m just glad the films are being shown even if there have been less than a [...]

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UCLA Film and Television Archive’s ongoing Festival of Preservation screened Li Hanxiang’s charming Love Eterne (1963) last night, one of the most popular Hong Kong films of all time. It’s a romantic musical of the accessible huangmei opera genre derived from folk songs, consisting of short stanzas and choruses that are often sung by [...]

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Werner Herzog has long obsessed over grandiose imagery and unusual documentary subjects (Kuwait’s burning oil fields, the Loch Ness monster, a lost tribe in the Amazon). So I expected his latest documentary–about a man and his girlfriend who were killed by a grizzly bear after the man spent years living with the beasts for [...]

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I listened to an interview with Hiroshima in America co-author Greg Mitchell last weekend on FAIR’s radio program, Counterspin. Mitchell talked about how documentary footage taken by both Japanese and American film crews in the days and weeks following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been suppressed by US authorities for decades. [...]

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I’ve been going through the excellent new 2-DVD release from Kino this week, Avant-garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s (which I’ll review shortly), but I’m also reminded of Image Entertainment’s much larger 7-DVD box set, Unseen Cinema: Early Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, to be released in October.
Before collapsing in a mass of consumerist tension, [...]

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I received UK author Clare Kitson’s new book, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey, this week. To my knowledge, it’s the first book-length study of Norstein, one of the world’s best living animators, and it largely recounts his life as it’s reflected by his impressionistic masterpiece, Tale of Tales (1979), a [...]

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