SXSW Review: "The Wall of Mexico"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from the SXSW Festival in Austin Texas

Of the many responses to Donald Trump that have come from the film community, nothing seems more overt a reference at the current moment than a film titled The Wall of Mexico. Yet our president doesn’t figure into the movie at all, and he’s not even referenced, explicitly or vaguely. Instead, the tables are turned and the wall referenced actually serves to protect a Mexican-American family from the uneducated Americans around them...

Click to read more ...

Review: 3 Faces

by Murtada Elfadl

In 3 Faces, the latest from Jafar Panahi (The Circle, Taxi) we are plunged right into the story as images of a young woman on a smart phone talking directly to the camera. She is announcing that her life's in jeopardy because her parents have  forbidden her from realizing her dream of acting. She then seemingly kills herself. For the next 90 minutes we follow the recipient of this message, Behnaz Jafari playing herself, a renowned Iranian actress and Panahi himself as they travel to a tiny village near the Turkish border to investigate.

There’s a mystery to solve. What happened to the young woman (Marziyeh Rezaei)? But also a deeper moral mystery; who are the inhabitants of her tiny village? Are they as nice and welcoming as they seem at first blush when Jafari and Panahi meet them? Deeper still is the moral quandary of a society that could drive a woman to take her own life just because she wanted to be actress...

Click to read more ...

Jan-Michael Vincent (1945-2019)

by Nathaniel R

Some stars burn bright and endure, others flame out. The latter was the case with Jan-Michael Vincent, a rising  star of movies and television in the 1970s. He's best remembered today from his leading role in the TV series  "Airwolf" but afterwards it was low profile movies (the kind we used to call "straight to video" - there doesn't seem to be a unified term for those movies anymore) and an increasingly diminished profile, his last screen performance coming in 2002. He died in February at 73 years old and the news was only just released a full month later...

Click to read more ...

Jennifer Jones Centennial: "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"

Reader Request: You voted on which Jennifer Jones films we had to write about for her centennial and this was your top choice. So it's your fault, then.

One of the tag lines reads...

In each other's arms they found a love that defied 5,000 years of tradition!

'Defying tradition? But what's more traditional than Hollywood casting white stars in Asian roles?' he said sarcastically. Figured we should get this out of the way upfront and then try to ignore it: Jennifer Jones's last Oscar nomination came for playing Han Suyin, a biracial doctor, who falls for Mark Elliott, an American foreign correspondent (William Holden) in Hong Kong...

Click to read more ...

Open Thread for International Women's Day

Still sick. Apologies!  So herewith an open thread. I'll give you a prompt.

Name the first three actresses you ever loved in the comments! Mine were probably Hayley Mills and Maureen O'Hara (because The Parent Trap was my favorite movie as a wee tyke) and Natalie Wood (because I was obsessed with musicals as a kid and particularly West Side Story airings on television). The trifecta of Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathleen Turner, and Meryl Streep that completely done me in* at movie theaters happened a bit later. 

 *aka caused my actressexuality