Paul Malcolm

”For everything you give an audience, you always have to take one thing away,“ says Christopher McQuarrie, the Academy Award--winning screenwriter of The Usual Suspects. ”They always have to pay for the story.“ In his directorial debut, The Way of the Gun, McQuarrie set out to make the price as......

Deep beneath the trumpeting of the digital-cinema revolution, beneath the bone-shaking soundtracks pumped through the Dolby or THX systems of sterile multiplexes and screening rooms, and way under the buzz of the Hollywood PR machine, the sound of lo-fi cinema can be heard in Los Angeles. It’s the steady click-clack-click......

New approaches, new audiences In the biggest Catch-22 in foreign-film distribution, if a film doesn‘t prove itself in New York, which has the highest promotional costs in the nation, chances are that exhibitors in other cities, including Los Angeles, will be reluctant to book it. “If it doesn’t make it......

Mexican director Arturo Ripstein was just explaining how he and his filmmaking colleagues persevere in the omnipresent shadow of Hollywood, when his train of thought was suddenly derailed. One of six international directors participating in a panel discussion as part of a series spotlighting foreign film last August at the......

Photo by Noel SutherlandIF PETER AND BOBBY FARRELLY -- THE WRITER-DIRECTOR team behind Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary -- came at us solely from a position of entrenched adolescence, their ever-expanding arsenal of butt cracks, swollen testicles, cum gags and flatulence would be neither as piss-your-pants funny......

INITIALLY SCHEDULED FOR SPRING, THE RELEASE of Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic's Cabaret Balkan was postponed when NATO began its air campaign over Kosovo and Yugoslavia. Produced in 1997 but set in 1995, soon after the official end of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the ensemble film unfolds over the course......

Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter"WHEN I FIRST STARTED TALKING ABOUT THE FILM, I USED to pretend it was a lot less autobiographical," says Tod Williams. "The big question for me was, why would anyone make an autobiographical film if you're a nobody?" And yet what's so captivating about his debut......

Debra DiPaoloWHAT DEFINES AN ESTABLISHED DIRECTOR? WHAT does it mean to be an emerging director? In the case of foreign filmmakers -- whether veterans or newcomers -- is it even possible anymore to meaningfully follow the trajectory of a career, given the vagaries and neglect that pass for foreign-film distribution......

Empathy is not exactly a hallmark of underground films these days, and neither is it a particularly distinctive quality in the work of one of that scene's low-watt luminaries, filmmaker Jon Moritsugu. In describing previous Moritsugu films such as Der Elvis, Terminal USA and Mod Fuck Explosion, critics invoke phrases......