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

AndrÈ Bazin once wrote, “Our melodrama in the last century has lost almost all its dramatic integrity and merely survives as a parody.” If that was true in the 1950s (with Sirk and Ray at the height of their powers), it’s definitely true today, when ironic detachment reigns supreme. Outside of contemporary Korean [...]

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Jose Avellar
MOMENTS OF GUADALAJARA
By Robert Koehler
Good stuff….Brian De Palma was here with Redacted, but unlike almost any director who ever attends a festival with his/her own film–exceptions include Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Jose Luis Guerin, the other “Joe,” Lav Diaz, Raya Martin, Albert Serra, Monte Hellman and the late Curtis Harrington–he actually went to see [...]

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GUADALAJARA’S MEXICAN PROBLEM
By Robert Koehler
Sure enough, as Guadalajara wound down, Lake Tahoe was one Mexican film in the competition that mattered, and as the paltry and fairly pathetic lineup played out, proved its value as a way out of the dead-end of what often passes for “comedy” in Mexican film….even if, as I noted before, [...]

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FROM BERLIN TO GUADALAJARA, CONT.
By Robert Koehler
By my count, although there are several films here direct from Berlin, only one is from Berlin’s most interesting section, the Forum: Ishtar Yasin’s astonishing debut, El Camino. This is the kind of film Forum was built for, and that Guadalajara would do well to show more of–intensely committed [...]

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FROM BERLIN TO GUADALAJARA
By Robert Koehler
The Guadalajara festival’s position on the calendar–besides being at a blissfully moderate time of year for the weather–allows it to pluck Latin American films from the various sections of Berlin. Last year, that meant for instance that Chico Teixera’s brilliant feature debut, Alice’s House (which recently played at the Nuart [...]

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Longtime readers of Filmjourney.org may have noticed a decisive lag in posts of late, and the reason is quite simple: my first child, Alexandra Anne Cummings, entered the world two weeks ago, and has been pretty greedy with my time. But we’re settling into a life pattern and the blogging here should resume with [...]

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GUADALAJARA: SEARCHING FOR A FESTIVAL
By Robert Koehler
So…. the idea with attending the Guadalajara film festival is to survey what’s popping up on the Mexican cinema horizon. The 23-year-old mission here has been to serve as a Mexico showcase, and it still is. Now, there are added layers, creating a slightly unwieldy superstructure of Latin American [...]

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