Film Analysis

Story producers are an integral part of the collaborative effort in the cinematic arts. Their job is to bring out the fullest potential in the story. They hone story strengths and create the structural foundation necessary to generate an unforgettable on-screen experience. Directors, screenwriters, and studios use story producers to construct, develop, and evaluate their project’s story.

For Dr. Randy Olson, a Harvard-educated marine biologist
who gave up his life in academia to begin a career in filmmaking, it's always
been about storytelling.  Even after transitioning from his tenured
professorship at the University of New Hampshire to becoming a film student at
the University of Southern California to establishing himself as a director, this common theme has endured.  "As
a scientist, I went into the field, gathered information, then analyzed it in

One of the many great things about Secrecy, the new
documentary directed by Harvard University professors Robb Moss and Peter
Galison, is that it doesn’t contribute to any sort of political fatigue -- that
angry/discouraged /helpless feeling you get after talking about politics for too
long.  
Without any narration, the film leads viewers into an
exploration of one of the most important and relevant questions of our time: Is
increased government secrecy post 9/11 keeping us safer, or is it destroying our
country’s most sacred values? 

When a topic is dear to millions of people, and a select few films have been able to capture the power of it, it is difficult for a new film to open audiences’ eyes in a new way; to make the audience see the topic in a new light.

Then Imre Kertesz wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old boy’s time in a concentration camp. That book, entitled Fateless, was adapted into a film of the same name and directed by Lajos Koltai. The Toronto Star believes it "shatters just about every cliché about the Holocaust."

If you're headed to Park City this January, skip the slopes and catch some of the films screening at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.  We've scoured the list for a handful of shorts, docs and features that have New England connections.  For more information on these films and for screening dates and times, visit http://festival.sundance.org. Also be sure to check out the roster at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival (www.slamdance.com) read more...

Commencing just after the Six-Day War and amidst the turbulent climate of social change and post-colonialism in the '60s, "Turn Left at the End of the World" chronicles the relations between two communities -- Indian and Moroccan Jews -- in a remote Israeli desert town through the eyes of two girls coming of age. Nicole (Netta Garti) is a mouthy, flirty, but also naïve Moroccan teenager, and Sarah (Liraz Charhi) is thoughtful, intelligent, if quieter and more removed, whose family has just moved in next door.

At first it sounds hard to believe: students in a journalism course at Chicago’s Northwestern University managed to exonerate some convicts on death row in Illinois. They merely followed their stories and examined the cases, but the closer they looked the more it seemed that something was not right. The, albeit popular, system of capital punishment had failed, and people took notice. From the press to Illinois Governor George Ryan, the debate over capital punishment had moved to the forefront in the state in 2002. After some read more...

Anya is the youngest daughter -- the first to grow up in the US -- of Polish filmmaker Marian Marzynski, and the former TV host and political refugee took every opportunity to capture his daughter on film and video as she grew up. From her early birthday parties, what he described in his voiceover as her first exposure to American consumerism, through the birth of her first child, 20-something years later, Marzynski hardly missed a moment.

Kids Favorites

Miss Nelson Has a Field Day
In this ALA Notable Video, nothing seems to help the hapless football team at the Horace B. Smedley School. Everyone is down in the dumps... until the arrival of the notorious Viola Swamp who takes it upon herself to whip the team into shape for the big Thanksgiving Day game. 

On Monday November 8, the 16th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival will celebrate same-sex marriage at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. San Francisco Bay Area filmmaker Bonnie Burt’s 28-minute video, "My Sister, My Bride" will be screened along with "The Gay Marriage Thing," by Stephanie Higgins of Massachusetts. The screenings will be immediately followed by a panel discussion of local activists, and Burt will be there as a special guest, the evening’s Visiting Artist.

Roberto Arévalo’s 30-minute documentary "Understanding Violence" is about the problem of violence in Boston -- why it happens and how it is dealt with. But, perhaps more importantly, it’s about the prevention of violence. Without preventing violence, the film’s youth and law enforcement officials agree, the cycle of crime and punishment continues, leaving crippled, incarcerated and dead kids in its wake.

Animation is alive and well in New England. The success of the first annual New England Animation Bash, a joint effort of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge and Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, and a comprehensive celebration of the art, proves it. Features, shorts, TV shows, the traditional and the computer generated and assisted alike, were screened before appreciative and enthusiastic audiences this June. The films also ranged from contemplative to creepy to side-splitting hilarity, and were made by artists as diverse as the many images read more...

The film festival is a strange beast. In theory it represents the cinephile’s dream: days of films from near or far, directors up close, and that magical possibility of discovery. In practice, unfortunately, these events consistently get bogged down in technical snafus and logistical emergencies or put glamour and glitz before quality and craftsmanship. Maybe this truism is why the 2004 Independent Film Festival of Boston was so impressive: it lived up to its promise to present a wide array of superb films without the requisite chaos.

"Goldfish Memory"

The drugs are what make mother and son duo Stephanie and Tony a bit of a family of three in the documentary "Foo-Foo Dust." They live with them, they talk about them constantly -- sometimes fondly and at others, scornfully -- and they work only to support their addictions. Twenty-two year old Tony is a heroin addict. Stephanie is on methadone, but her drug of choice is crack. Tony describes his mother’s life at one point as containing three things: "Me, rock and her." His seems essentially the same, of course with junk, not rock, in second place.

In the world of contemporary film, there are rough but rugged independent films that you can’t forget, and then there are patched-together, filmed-in-my-back-yard indie flicks -- as in, "Hey wasn’t that my ex-landlord in that last scene?" Garth Donovan’s "Everyone’s Got One" somehow manages to capture the essence of both. Written by Donovan and Paul Thompson, the movie opens at a screenwriting seminar and follows the (hopefully) fictionalized life of the (hopefully) fictional Garth Donovan, as he read more...

Human Rights Watch brings its International Film Festival to Boston for the fourth time on January 22-26. Two films by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad are featured -- "Ford Transit," which follows a cab driver as he detours around roadblocks and speeds through short cuts in Ramallah and Jerusalem, and "Rana's Wedding" (returning from last year's festival), about a young woman who flees her family home to unite with her boyfriend after her father demands that she choose a husband from the eligible bachelors he has read more...

Jafar Panahi’s "Crimson Gold" begins in the middle of a foiled bank robbery, the thief and his victim obscured by shadows. But when things go wrong, there are no sensational Hollywood tricks or clever escapes. For Pahani’s film is gritty and realistic, entirely unsentimental. The film, showing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts as part of the current Festival of Films from Iran, evokes the envy and eventual despair -- brought about by economic disparity -- that can lead to violent crime.

The popular perception about the horrors of the Holocaust is that they ended with the surrender of Germany. In reality, the passive neglect of the victorious Allies, while not as devastating as the active persecution at the hands of the Nazis, proved a prolongation of many of the same inhumane conditions. The nearly eight million refugees (as many as 250 thousand of them Jews), were met with indifference at best. Often released far from home, they found themselves herded into displaced person camps with inadequate shelter, food, hygiene, and read more...

Sometimes love just isn’t meant to be. This saying forms the background of Kyle Gilman’s short film "The Epic Tale of Kalesius and Clotho," featured in the upcoming Northampton Film Festival. Subtitled "A Meditation on the Impossibility of Romantic Love in a Rapidly Expanding Universe," Gilman’s film toys with narrative structure in a meta-fictional way; it tells of his attempts to bring to life a (fictional) Greek myth in a film within the film of the same name. He addresses the camera much of the time, sharing with us read more...

The current take on the history of any art form is in ever-changing flux. The reputation of some painters, writers, filmmakers, and composers fades over time, while forgotten and obscure masters are constantly being rediscovered. The work of avant-garde American composer George Antheil has experienced a surge in the past few years, largely due to the recent premier (at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell) of the recently unearthed original version of his modernist masterpiece, the "Ballet Mecanique" (1923-24), originally read more...

Possibly no film genre has been driven down as many dull, predictable roads as the romantic comedy. Thankfully, I only review independent films, or I might find myself obliged to watch all the unimaginative love stories Hollywood seems to crank out at a stultifying pace. There will always be a market for vaguely satisfying but forgettable date movies, and Hollywood is all too willing to satisfy the need. The indie film "On_Line," directed by Jed Weintrob and written by Weintrob and Boston-area native Andrew Osborne, doesn't quite read more...

For the eighth consecutive July, the MFA Film Program and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Boston presents the Boston French Film Festival. One of the world's most extensive showcases of French cinema, it runs from July 10 through July 27 and marks the Boston premier of 27 feature films. Here's a sampling.

L'Adversaire (The Adversary)

Documentaries these days tend to focus on anomalies, people whose charming and often grotesque peculiarities partly serve to remind us of how comfortably normal we are. But every once in a while, along comes a film about someone who, despite his or her flaws, functions as a role model, shows us a possible approach to our own lives. Such is the case with director Kaylyn Thornal's documentary "A Centered Universe" about 80-year-old potter, sculptor, painter, and founder of the Cape Museum of Fine Arts -- Harry Holl. Holl has read more...

Christian de Rezendes’ "Getting Out of Rhode Island" overwhelms you right from the start, with a flash-forward opening montage that immerses you headlong into a crowded, noisy party, jumping quickly through time to give you a taste of what’s to come without gaining any comfortable understanding. Disorientation seems to be the norm. Dialogue from different characters overlap, characters interrupt each other, party chatter echoes constantly in the background. Then, just as suddenly, de Rezendes quickly backtracks to just read more...

"Walking on Water"

The Same River Twice

"Group"

"Group," a film by Anne de Marcken and Marilyn Freeman, tracks eight women and one therapist as they struggle together through 21 weeks of group therapy. De Marcken and Freeman hashed our four drafts before tossing the script, deciding instead to work with the actors individually to create a personality and history for each character, as well as a 21-week storyline covering the time the therapy takes place. The result is a fascinating, compelling film.

"Last Just Man"