OFCS members don’t just write film reviews. Here are several articles you might find interesting.
Interviews
Cary Elwes on “The Princess Bride”
Nell Minow @ The Huffington Post
Dan Stevens, Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett on “The Guest”
Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
The Guest – Dan Stevens, Adam Wingard & Simon Barrett
Billy Donnelly @ This Is Infamous
Liam Neeson
- Excerpt: Stefan Pape interviews Liam Neeson for his role in A Walk Among the Tombstones.
The Maze Runner – Dylan O’Brien, Kaya Scodelario & Will Poulter
Billy Donnelly @ This Is Infamous
Mike Nelson of Rifftrax
Kristen Lopez @ Cinema Sentries
Nathan Gamble and Cozi Zuehlsdorff of “Dolphin Tale 2?
Pawel Pawlikowski on Ida
Philip Concannon @ Phil on Film
Philip Elliott Hopkins, founder of The Film Detective, Rockport, Mass.
Phil Hall @ Business-Superstar.com
- Excerpt: An interview with the creator of a new DVD label speciaizing in classic and cult flicks
Terry Gilliam
William Bibbiani @ CraveOnline
- Excerpt: Terry Gilliam discusses the big ideas in The Zero Theorem and The Church of Batman the Redeemer.
Festivals: General Coverage
All Good Things Come to an End
- Excerpt: Wrapping up my experience at TIFF 2014
Destroy All Monsters: The Last TIFF
TIFF 2014: Festival Wrap-up and ‘Best of the Fest’
- Excerpt: Top picks for TIFF ’14 include Wild, Mommy, Sunshine Superman, and more!
Festivals: Individual Reviews
Coming Home plays TIFF 2014
- Excerpt: The poetry of true love and heartbreak, as only Zhang Yimou can recite.
Cub
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘Cub’ takes the archetypal slasher movie and warps it into an unhinged fight for survival against a clever monster and his acolyte.
The Dead Lands
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘The Dead Lands’ is a commanding film about young warrior who finds a mentor in a lonesome fighter and maturity in a quest for vengeance.
The Duke of Burgundy
Dukhtar
The Equalizer
Goodbye to Language — NYFF 2014
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Godard pushes the flexible boundaries of cinema like a virtuoso avant-garde jazz musician painting colors on sound.
Goodnight Mommy
- Excerpt: Gruesome and increasingly disquieting in ways that English language efforts seem increasingly unable to master, Veronika Franz proves to be an exciting director in her own right and, best of all, you won’t forget how mommy gets put to bed.
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘Goodnight Mommy’ is a disturbing display of a child’s imagination run amok and the horrific uses they can devise for model glue.
Guidance
H.
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet’ is a striking big screen adaptation of the Lebanese poet’s classic text brought to life by a selection of internationally acclaimed animators.
The Keeping Room
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘The Keeping Room’ features a trio of resilient women who persevere against marauding soldiers during this Civil War drama.
Magical Girl
Sarah Gopaul @ Digital Journal
- Excerpt: ‘Magical Girl’ throws conventional narrative structure out the window and makes audiences work to put together the pieces of the puzzle.
Men, Women & Children plays TIFF 2014
- Excerpt: Jason Reitman wants to talk about how the internet has changed love and sex. But is it too early for that conversation…and do we even have time to have it?
Misunderstood — NYFF 2014
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: “Misunderstood” is a movie that fails to shine any ostensibly promised light on the plight of a little girl who comes to take her problems far too seriously for her age.
My Old Lady
Nightcrawler
OIAF Review: ‘Lisa Limone and Maroc Orange: A Rapid Love Story’
- Excerpt: Animated Estonian opera screened at the 2014 Ottawa International Animation Festival.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
The President
Return to Ithaca
Rosewater plays TIFF 2014
- Excerpt: Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but a journalist walks into an Iranian prison…
Song of the Sea
Jordan M. Smith @ IONCINEMA.com
- Excerpt: Melding Irish myth with a wash of cinematic reference points that pay homage and inspire in equal measure, director Tomm Moore and his army of inventive artists and animators at Cartoon Saloon have crafted a wonderously imaginative film in Song of the Sea, which lifts from folk stories of the legendary ‘selkies’ that live as humans on land and seals at sea to form a sensorially stunning commentary on the importance of storytelling and unified kinship.
They Have Escaped
This Is Where I Leave You
Top Five plays TIFF 2014
- Excerpt: Chris Rock has been responsible for some of the most cutting and edgy comedy of this century. At TIFF, he takes his game to a whole other level.
Toronto 2014: Second Dispatch
Kenji Fujishima @ In Review Online
Tusk
Waste Land
While We’re Young
Jordan M. Smith @ IONCINEMA.com
- Excerpt: While We’re Young is stuffed with endless kitschy cliches that garner laughs and eye rolls in equal measure. Baumbach’s running social portraiture has never been as broadly conventional in his humor, but thanks to the leading quartet’s surprisingly reserved comedic turns, his self reflective film of artistic authenticity and the acceptance of one’s age remains strikingly funny, despite its heavy handed tendencies.
While We’re Young plays TIFF 2014
- Excerpt: Every generation draws from the generations that flank them, and every generation can be surprisingly selfish.
Tributes
Joan Rivers
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: It seems curious to me that Rivers was so often hailed as a trailblazer in comedy, in particular for female comics, but she never commanded the respect all those that came after her received.
Awards Coverage
European Film Awards 2014 – os filmes pré-seleccionados
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Feature Films selected for the 2014 edition of the European Film Awards
MOTELx – Festival Internacional de Cinema de Terror de Lisboa: os vencedores
- Excerpt: MOTELx is Lisbon’s Horror Film Festival and they announced they’re winners on September 14th, 2014.
Oscar Preview: Weekend of Sep. 12-14, 2014
- Excerpt: Looking at the Oscar chances of “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”
TIFF 2014: The Awards Season Impact of This Year’s Fest
Erik Childress @ RogerEbert.com
Television
The Americans: Cardinal
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
The Americans: Walk In
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
Doctor Who: Deep Breath
- Excerpt: The focus on the Paternoster Gang is perhaps the biggest detriment to Deep Breath.
Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: Deep Breath is neither a triumph nor an embarrassment. It’s just business as usual for Doctor Who, which ultimately may be the best way forward for the show; to stop making such a big deal of everything, and just tell stories.
Doctor Who: Into the Dalek
- Excerpt: I suggest that Into the Dalek looks a bit like a remake of the Ninth Doctor story Dalek.
Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: To turn what seemed like a fairly cheesy idea into something the ends up being quite moving and thoughtful is the sort of thing that Doctor Who should strive for every week, and it more or less justifies the show’s tendency to surround that substantial stuff with a lot of nonsense.
Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood
- Excerpt: Personally, I feel Robot of Sherwood was an embarrassment to all concerned.
Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: The idea that stories give meaning to our lives is a pretty big theme to throw in at the end of an episode about an alien fighting robots alongside a man in green tights, but it’s handled with such wit and grace, and it ties so nicely into The Doctor’s suspicions about Robin, that it just about carries it off.
Franklin & Bash: Good Cop/Bad Cop
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: Could it be that Franklin & Bash is pulling itself out of the mire it has found itself in after the disastrous season opener?
Franklin & Bash: Love is The Drug
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: After having two disastrous episodes, Love Is the Drug is the first good Franklin & Bash story this season. This, sadly, isn’t to say that it is particularly good or engaging, but at least it isn’t as horrible.
Essays
‘Young Frankenstein’ and the Enduring Appeal of the Horror Comedy
- Excerpt: Unlike some of his other works (like ‘Blazing Saddles,’ ‘Spaceballs,’ or the later, and far less successful, ‘Dracula: Dead and Loving It’), the Brooks of ‘Young Frankenstein’ isn’t really skewering the conventions of the horror movie — he’s paying tribute to them, and using them as scaffolding for his particular brand of goofy, Borscht Belt burlesque.
“Like Being Alive at My Own Funeral”: John Waters on 50 Years of Filmmaking
- Excerpt: “I’d like to thank the Lincoln Center for really making me respectable and filthy at the same time.” And with those words, cult filmmaker, author, raconteur, and living legend John Waters kicked off “50 Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” (“I don’t know the answer to that!,” he joked. “How much of myself can I take?”), the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of a half-century of perversion, transgression, and general bad behavior.
A Brief History of Film Artists Who Aren’t Doing This for Critics
- Excerpt: Sneering at elitist professionals and taking on a humble, “just-for-the-folks” stance is a reliable go-to response to films that send scribes gagging from the theaters.
The Disturbing Pornographic Tendences of “No Good Deed”
“>Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: No Good Deed is essentially a pornographic film without the sex. In its place is an almost fetishistic interest in showing women being brutalized.
Fandango Fans Choose Films With Complex Female Lead Characters As Their Top Two Fall Picks
More Niche Than Niche, And Other Lessons From Kevin Smith’s TUSK
A Music Hoarder’s Eulogy for the iPod Classic
- Excerpt: Perusing such half-assed obits, your correspondent felt weirdly old and out of touch, like the last guy wandering into K-Mart asking what they did with all the 8-Tracks. Am I the only one who mourns for the iPod?
Personal Reflections on Sherlock: The Empty Hearse
Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: I stop at this juncture because I genuinely worry that Sherlockians have gone from mere fans of a show and slipped into insanity. I don’t mean the metaphorical version of insanity. No, I mean the quite literal version of insanity.
You Guys, We’re Getting a Hip Hop-Punk Coming of Age Story!
Reviews of Short Films
Água para Tabatô
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Portuguese Short Documentary Film Review
Contactos 2.0
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Portuguese Short Film Review
Images of Bedlam
Nocturno
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Spanish Short Film Review
Se o Dia Chegar
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
- Excerpt: Portuguese Short Film Review
Tell Tale Signs
Unravelling Eve
Other Articles
The 11 Toughest Movie Mazes
William Bibbiani @ CraveOnline
The Identical
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: [VIDEO ESSAY] A shoo-in for a spot on any worst movies of 2014 list, this poorly constructed slice of propaganda, courtesy of the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA), is so unintentionally campy you can’t help but laugh.
The Morning After: Sep. 15, 2014
- Excerpt: Short Reviews of “The Insider” and “The Giver”
Tightwad Terror Tuesday for 9-16-14 – The Best Free Movies on the Web
James Jay Edwards @ iHorror.com
Wetlands
Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: [VIDEO ESSAY] Challenging and provocative, co-writer/director David Wnendt’s nervy adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s long-presumed unfilmable popular novel breaks new cinematic ground.