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Where is Jafar Panahi's "The White Ballo ...

A blog about film and politics, and the politics of filmmaking.

Anthony Kaufman is a film journalist and critic, who has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Village Voice and Slate, and contributes regularly to Variety, indieWIRE, the Wall Street Journal Online and the Utne Reader.
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Where You Should #OCCUPYTHECINEMAS This Friday

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 29, 2012 9:20 PM
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1 Comment

News

If you haven't heard about #OCCUPYTHECINEMAS, this Friday's Day of Action to protest corporate cinema, please read my previous post and sign the petition. Now that you're ready to join the campaign against the restrictive, monopolizing ways of Hollywood and support a more independent, democratic cinema, where do you go from here? To the art-house, my friends!

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 28, 2012 8:08 PM
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After the Oscar win for "A Separation" and the release, starting this Wednesday, of Jafar Panahi's "This Is Not a Film" at the Film Forum, fans of Iranian cinema are probably celebrating. But let's not forget: Panahi remains in the same virtual prison seen in his triumphant, solitary masterpiece, even as the film itself has the freedom to travel. The reviews of "This Is Not a Film" are stellar ("a great film," "extraordinary," "deft and ironic," "inspiring as it is heartbreaking"), but Panahi still sits at home, awaiting to begin his six-year prison sentence. According to those close to the filmmaker, he has little legal recourse left, and must face his unjust punishment.

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 28, 2012 9:06 AM
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Now that we can move beyond the shallow, desparate spectacle of the Academy Awards, I want to direct your attention on the eve of the #OCCUPYTHECINEMAS Day of Action this Friday to a new initiative called Cinemas in Solidarity, a grassroots movement of independent movie theaters standing in solidarity with OWS and against the corporate multiplexing of America.

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 25, 2012 9:57 PM
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6 Comments

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In 2006, I wrote a post called "Why the Spirit Awards Suck," which criticized the indie awards event mainly for giving into glossy pressures and doing nothing to distinguish itself from its big brother AMPAS's Oscar ceremony the following day. "My apologies to everyone who enjoyed themselves at Saturday's Spirit Awards, but the event has officially proven itself to be a self-congratulatory waste of indie spirit and totally irrelevant on a larger scale," I wrote. "Everyone knows that the most talked-about movies that emerge from the Spirits are the same big studio-indie productions that go on the following night to win Oscars."

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 16, 2012 9:12 AM
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Since America's "War on Terror" has slipped from the headlines, our collective memory of the torture and atrocities committed by the U.S. has also seemed to subside. We've seen Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side," Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure," Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" and Rory Kennedy's "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," just to name a few. But was that enough to alleviate our collective guilt? Not really. With Doug Liman's new project "Reckoning With Torture: Memos and Testimonies From the 'War On Terror,'” Americans aren't watching the events unfold from the outside, but personally taking account of the atrocities by reading testimonials of torture from witnesses and victims.

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 15, 2012 1:19 PM
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7 Comments

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Hey you, film-lovers, filmmakers and film fans: Are you ready to make a statement about the movies you want? Are you ready to take a stand and tell the powers that be that you want a free Internet and more fair copyright provisions? Are you ready to join the Occupy Movement and "reclaim our voices and challenge our society’s obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations"?

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 15, 2012 10:57 AM
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1 Comment

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The reviews are starting to come in on "Thin Ice," the Wisconsin-set comic crime caper that originally screened at Sundance under the name "The Convincer" and was then re-edited and re-scored without the participation of its director Jill Sprecher. And so far, it's only Time Out New York's Joshua Rothkpof who has duly noted in his review, "It’s uncertain whether director Jill Sprecher wants to call the film her own anymore."

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 10, 2012 10:14 AM
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2 Comments

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It was only a matter of time before documentary propagandists on the right would launch an anti-Obama screed. Watch out, folks, here we go: From the man who brought us the Sarah Palin hagiography "The Undefeated" comes a new film based on the forthcoming book: "The Corruption Chronicles, Obama's Big Secrecy, Big Corruption, and Big Government," written by Tom Fitton, who is president of Judicial Watch, an organization that claims to be "nonpartisan." Yeah, if they're nonpartisan, so was Mao Zedong.

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 10, 2012 9:13 AM
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0 Comments

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Whenever a company I don't expect comes along and picks up a film that I admire -- say when Fox Searchlight acquired "Shame" and "Martha Marcy May Marlene" last year or when some years back, Miramax picked up "In the Bedroom" or Fine Line took out "Dancer in the Dark," I get nervous. So it was when new distributor Millennium Entertainment announced that it had bought and would release Oren Moverman's tightly focused portrait in police misconduct and psychological turmoil "Rampart," starring Woody Harrelson as a corrupt cop. One of my favorite films from last year's Toronto International Film Festival, "Rampart" needs tender-loving care in the marketplace. Is Millennium up to the challenge?

By Anthony Kaufman
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February 9, 2012 10:16 AM
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A production announcement about a new English-language genre franchise coming from Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna's Mexico-based Canana Films caught my eye this morning for a number of reasons. While the use of genre--and horror, in particular--to attack contemporary social issues isn't new ("Night of the Living Dead" anyone?), I'm particularly intrigued by what's going on in Mexico right now, and Canana, specifically, as they also backed Gerardo Naranjo's narco-thriller "Miss Bala," which is really a thinly veiled scathing indictment of Mexico's culture of violence and superficiality.

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