115 articles

More than 14 years later and the war in Afghanistan is still going on. President Obama declared the end of U.S. military combat operations in Afghanistan in December of 2014, but 9,800 American...
Feb 24, 2016 / Eric M. Armstrong
Alison Frank reports from the 67th Locarno Film Festival, interviewing two directors from the international competition, Lucie Borleteau (“Fidélio, l’odyssée d’Alice”) and Andrea Staka (“Cure – The...
Oct 13, 2014 / Alison Frank
From What is Before , a 338-minute film by Filipino director Lav Diaz, has won the Golden Leopard, grand prize of the 67th Locarno Film Festival. The moody and atmospheric black-and-white film...
Sep 1, 2014 / Alison Frank
A guest blog from Mico Tatalovic When the representative of Single Stream , one of the shorts screened here, said ‘hope you enjoy our trashy movie’ I didn’t actually expect it to be about trash. Nor...
Aug 16, 2014 / Alison Frank
Dima Nitikin is an honest plumber who lives with his wife and son in his parents’ apartment. Studying architecture in his spare time, he’s what you might call ambitious, but not by his mother’s...
Aug 13, 2014 / Alison Frank
A mechanic in the French navy, Alice (Ariane Labed) spends much of her life on board cargo ships. Her new boyfriend Félix, a Norwegian graphic novelist, waits patiently for her at home. She is called...
Aug 12, 2014 / Alison Frank
A screenshot from All we Share A guest post from Mico Tatalovic, in Locarno, Switzerland. Strolling through the narrow streets of Locarno, a picturesque lake-side town surrounded by the Alps, on the...
Aug 10, 2014 / Alison Frank
Les Invisibles does more than you’d expect of a documentary about elderly gay and lesbian people. I went into this film anticipating a series of interesting stories about individual lives, but this...
Jul 19, 2013 / Alison Frank
Founded in 1999 by students at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, the Nippon Connection film festival has become the biggest platform for current Japanese cinema outside of Japan. The festival...
May 16, 2013 / Alison Frank
The French New Wave was not the only new wave of the 1960s: during a temporary loosening of the Communist regime’s hold on culture, Czechoslovakia had its own new wave that produced films just as...
Feb 26, 2013 / Alison Frank
Göteborg is the home of Scandinavia’s most important international film festival, offering one of the world’s most generous prizes: a Dragon Award of 1 million Swedish kronor (nearly 158 000 USD) for...
Feb 19, 2013 / Alison FrankIn 1988, Chile held a referendum to decide whether dictator Augusto Pinochet should stay in power. For one month, both sides could express their views in daily 15-minute TV slots. Pablo Larraín’s new...
Feb 7, 2013 / Alison Frank
Was the surrealist ambition to revolutionise consciousness a natural fit with revolutionary politics? The relationship between art and politics has historically been problematic: witness the sterile,...
Jan 7, 2013 / Alison Frank
This year marked the 50 th anniversary of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia . To mark the occasion, a digitally restored edition was released, and I had a chance to see it on the Empire Leicester...
Dec 31, 2012 / Alison Frank
As we reach the end of an inspiring year for cinema, here are ten titles that stood out for me in 2012, and an explanation of why I chose each of them. Although I saw many of these at film festivals,...
Dec 24, 2012 / Alison Frank


