A few years before she directed a soon-to-be pop-culture touchstone in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fran Rubel Kuzui helmed her debut feature Tokyo Pop, a charming picaresque that has languished largely in cult obscurity for 35 years. A 4K restoration, supported through the Jane Fonda Women Directors Fund, opened in New York City and Los Angeles this past August, and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A bracing, anti-nativist love story; a ‘90s art-house classic of urban longing
Call it love in the time of nativism. Darkly comic and fretfully relevant, Bulgarian writer-director Ivaylo Hristov’s Fear (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD) exists on a pitch-black nexus between satire and documentary. It’s set in a seaside village along the Turkish border, where the locals are bracing for a brutal winter. Signs of life are scant, as fog blankets skeletal trees, … [Read more...]
‘Days’: One quiet story, one unforgettable moment
As a cinema studies major in college, I read — or, more precisely, hate-read — Robert McKee’s Story, the industry bible for commercial screenwriting. On page after page, I scoffed at its provincial advice. One of McKee’s signature strictures, that a film’s plot should be established within the first 10 minutes of screen time, would have ruled out too many of the best movies … [Read more...]