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DGSmith
Damon Smith is a New York-based film journalist. He has written features, profiles, and reviews for The Boston Globe, Time Out New York, Filmmaker magazine, Senses of Cinema ...
Review: The Universe of Keith HaringIt’s hard not to admire the vitality and prolific creative energies of ’80s art darling Keith Haring, an effervescent presence who’s rarely at rest in this high-spirited tribute to the late popularizer of New York street art. By now, Haring’s barking mutts and tumbling neon stick figures are as ubiquitous ... read more Posted on 10/22/2008 by DGSmith South Asian Film Fest: NYCOn Wednesday, the fifth annual South Asian International Film Festival gets underway in Manhattan. This year, the weeklong event will feature around 50 feature-length films and shorts from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, including Nandita Das’s Firaaq, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and ... read more Posted on 10/20/2008 by DGSmith Wajda in New YorkTonight, the Film Society of Lincoln Center opens an exhaustive new retrospective of Polish master Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Man of Iron, The Promised Land) that runs through November 13. Still active at 82, Wajda himself will be in town to introduce some of his films, including the ... read morePosted on 10/17/2008 by DGSmith Kurosawa's Family Disc(h)ordBest known for his ingeniously terrifying Pulse, a ghostly techno-thriller about a rash of suicides in contemporary urban Japan (remade, badly, in 2006 from a Wes Craven script), Kiyoshi Kurosawa has tirelessly confounded our expectations of genre film. What unites the supernatural elements of his most devilishly clever horror flicks ... read more Posted on 10/16/2008 by DGSmith Review: ChangelingAngelina Jolie sets her silky, bee-stung lips a-quivering in Clint Eastwood’s weepie-whatsit period melodrama Changeling, playing the mother of a missing son in 1920s California who’s persecuted by an incorrigibly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department. Basing his script on a sensational real-life tabloid story one imagines James Ellroy would have ... read more Posted on 10/15/2008 by DGSmith Adieu, GuillaumeI can’t pretend to have seen Guillaume Depardieu, son of the renowned French actor Gérard Depardieu, in all that many films, but news of his sad, untimely passing yesterday put me in a solemn frame of mind. Over the years, the 37-year-old-actor, who died of pneumonia at a Paris-area hospital, ... read more Posted on 10/15/2008 by DGSmith FLAHERTY NYCFrom our friends at The Flaherty Seminar. Read on! Monday, October 13, 7:30 pm - Oliver Husain in person The Flaherty NYC series premiere will feature the New York City debut of films by Oliver Husain, a German-Indian artist currently based in Toronto, who uses visual media to explore ideas ... read morePosted on 10/09/2008 by DGSmith Outside the FrameWeek in and week out, as part of our ongoing series of video interviews, I chat up film-world personalities along with my producer and colleague, Cristina Garza. And sometimes, it’s the things people say before the cameras go live, or after they’ve been powered down, that remain with me weeks ... read more Posted on 10/08/2008 by DGSmith BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOMEEach September, as the New York Film Festival rolls out two weeks of film for its illustrious guests and patrons, the event stirs up mixed feelings among this city’s hardcore cinephile community. Veteran malcontents like to grouse that there is too much middlebrow programming from the likes of Wes Anderson ... read morePosted on 10/08/2008 by DGSmith Kazakh Film: Chouga and TulpanEvery major film festival presents a gallery of cinema offerings and possible discoveries for those curious enough to seek out unfamiliar work by international narrative-film artists and imagemakers. The New York Film Festival may play it safe by screening films that already have theatrical distribution, like Steven Soderbergh’s twin-halved 262-minute ... read more Posted on 10/08/2008 by DGSmith |
