Demitra Kampakis

Writer, Editor, Cinephile

New York City, NY

Film Editor for Posture Magazine Contributing Writer for The Film Stage, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Vague Visages and Cinema Scope Magazine Also IndieWire & Criterion Daily Brandeis University Class of 2013

Demitra Kampakis

Writer, Editor, Cinephile

New York City, NY

Film Comment Selects Shines a Light on Desolation, Despair and Destruction
Earlier this month, the Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted its 19th annual Film Comment Selects festival, a weeklong showcase of standout feature films from the past year’s international festival circuit, curated by the Film Comment editorial team. The Hidden City opens with a shot of what look to be twilight stars, tiny flecks of light twinkling in an otherwise pitch-black frame.
Review: "The Wild Pear Tree" Is Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Beguiling Portrait of Life in Modern Turkey
All of which is to say, this film earns every one of those 188 minutes. Sinan (a stubbly, slack jawed and heavy-lidded Dogu Dermikol), our hero, has just graduated from college, and we first meet him upon his return to his hometown of Çanakkale, where he occasionally shuttles back and forth to his grandparents’ neighboring rural village of Çan.
Reviews Festivals New York Film Festival
11 Offenses of 2018
If you’re new to Reverse Shot in this, our 15th year of existence, and you’ve only just happened upon this annual diary of hate, we want you to know we’re actually full of love. We believe in the power of film to move people’s hearts and minds. Unfortunately it can also move bowels, as we’re usually reminded around this time of year.
Glenn Close
Glenn Close was honored by the Museum of the Moving Image at their annual gala in New York on December 3, 2018. On the surface, Glenn Close doesn’t seem to have much in common with Joan Castleman, the protagonist of Bjorn Runge’s The Wife. For one thing, Close never had to sacrifice her career, or neuter her own ambitions, in favor of a husband’s.
Frederick Wiseman
Frederick Wiseman has often referred to his films as being “novelistic, not journalistic.”. This is an important distinction, given their curious, often revelatory nature. His films shine a light on specific people in specific places, and the systems that weave the social fabric of those places. In his new film Monrovia, Indiana, Wiseman once again turns his inquisitive eye toward the daily workings of municipal life.
Festivals New York Film Festival Interviews
A Faithful Man
A Faithful Man begins with a very unceremonious breakup: after establishing domestic bliss with his gorgeous girlfriend Marianne (Laetitia Casta), Abel (Louis Garrel) is now being told with deadpan indifference that his lover is leaving him for his best friend, Paul. Not only that, she’s having Paul’s baby.
Non-Fiction
If that sounds like a dizzying philosophical fusillade, it’s because it is precisely that. To call Assayas’s latest film thematically ambitious would be an understatement. Non-Fiction centers around five characters who to one degree or another exist within the insular milieu of Parisian publishing, and who find themselves having to professionally and personally adapt to the various seismic cultural changes brought on by social media in different ways.
The Favourite
Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer was a macabre and modern reimagining of the myth of Agamemnon. In his new film The Favourite, Lanthimos’s inspiration is historical rather than literary. In different ways, Abigail and Lady Sarah are both crafty and cunning women, each with her own personal reasons for wanting to be in the Queen’s good graces; though the status, decadence, and power that come with it surely are not far from their minds.
Her Smell
Alex Ross Perry’s oeuvre boasts a generous offering of narcissistic characters, and his latest film, Her Smell, is no exception. A shrieking fever pitch of a film chronicling one woman’s descent into self-destructive madness, Her Smell has echoes of Perry’s 2015 Queen of Earth, which also charted a female protagonist’s psychic unraveling.
Sebastián Lelio
Fresh off his Academy Award for A Fantastic Woman, Chilean-born director Sebastián Lelio returns with Disobedience, a stirring, slow-simmering portrait of two women living on the fringes of their Orthodox Jewish community in London. As with A Fantastic Woman and his earlier Gloria, Lelio casts his deeply empathetic gaze on the conflicted interior lives of his female protagonists, while continuing to thematically probe the contours of faith, free will, love, loss, and sexuality.
Interviews Tribeca Film Festival Festivals
Changing the Social Contract: Ruben Östlund Discusses "The Square"
In doing so, Östlund transforms his film into—among other things—a caustic commentary on a global capitalist society that continues to reward self-interest over social harmony. In skewering the commercialization of art, The Square effectively draws attention to the well-meaning, though ultimately myopic, worldview of a privileged slice of the population, whose experiences within Stockholm’s social apparatus often bristle against the harsh realities of life for many.
The Singular and Uncompromising Vision of HBO’s “The Deuce”
The HBO series’ assured storytelling and detailed world-building continues to enrich its expanding milieu. In the second episode of The Deuce, titled “Show and Prove,” patrolmen officers Danny Flanagan (Don Harvey) and Chris Alston (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) are seen rounding up some of the women working the titular Times Square streets.
New York Film Festival Review: Serge Bozon’s ‘Madame Hyde’
Throughout her long and illustrious career, Isabelle Huppert has never shied away from playing dysfunctional female characters whose near-fetishistic penchant for torrent displays of emotion are often grounded in the psychosexual. Whether she’s playing a piano teacher with macabre sexual fixations, an elusive and discomfiting video game developer or an emotionally dependent film director, Huppert seems to welcome the opportunity to play layered characters whose sadomasochistic tendencies are rich with Freudian subtext.
The Heart and Hustle of HBO’s Must-See New Series ‘The Deuce’
Sex is transactional, and female bodies are the commodities. This is the thematic underpinning of The Deuce, HBO’s new 1970s porn-era period piece from co-creators David Simon and George Pelecanos. Both shows were set in a specific time and place in American culture, and like those series, The Deuce captures and critiques a particular slice of American society with a gritty and immersive realism — one that is humanely rendered and brought to life by a sprawling and talented ensemble cast.
Dream Visions From Guy Maddin and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
This article was produced as part of the NYFF Critics Academy. Read more on this year’s class here. "Dream logic embraces embodied instinct and cosmic self-awareness, our lowest animal desires and our highest spiritual aspirations, our darkest fears and our brightest joys. It governs a much wider range of experiences and realities than is normally recognized by waking consciousness."
indieWIRE
New York Film Festival Reviews Festivals
‘Take Me’: Director-Actor Pat Healy and Editor Brian Scofield on Comedic Kinks and Cinematic Hijinks
Ray Moody, the main character in star and director Pat Healy’s 2017 feature Take Me, owns a business that is as dubious as it is eyebrow-raising. Titled Kidnap Solutions, LLC, Ray’s service offers clients the chance to pay for and participate in their own simulated abduction, with the hopes that the experience will scare them straight out of whatever vice or emotional hang-up they’re currently mired in.
Festivals Tribeca Film Festival Interviews

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Demi Kampakis joined Posture Magazine in 2013 as a staff writer, and is now the magazine's film editor. During that time, she has covered multiple film festivals, premieres, screenings and press conferences, and has conducted interviews with leading industry talent.

In 2015, Ms. Kampakis was selected as a finalist for the New York Film Festival Critics Academy; where she contributed film reviews to Indiewire's Criticwire blog, and served under the tutelage of some of the best minds in film criticism today.

In 2013 she received her Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Biology with a double major in Film, Television, and Interactive Media Studies from Brandeis University. In addition to being an aspiring film critic, she plans on ultimately pursuing a PhD in Film Theory and Criticism.

A passionate--nee obsessed--cinephile, Ms. Kampakis understands that film criticism, like cinema itself, is both an art and a way of life.