Caveh Zahedi’s PSA: Talking with the Auteur of I Am a Sex Addict
“Not only is it personal — it’s downright embarrassing.” Fourteen years in the making and spanning eighteen years, Caveh Zahedi’s I am a Sex Addict, despite a lukewarm reaction upon[…]
Category: Directors
Artists · Directors · Movies · Reviews
Inherit the Wind: Talking with Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride About The Other Side of the Wind
Life with the restless ghost of Orson Welles’ last movie In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957-58 to make Touch of[…]
The Reckless Art of Erich von Stroheim Part One: The Pinnacle
“Like every other skilled fabulist on earth there would forever be a part of Stroheim that truly believed his own fantasies.” 1. True Fake Nobleman Somewhere between his departure from[…]
The Peculiar Kind: The Humor of Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation
“People are constantly falling back on their beds — but always in languor, never in passion . . .” It’s difficult not to be grateful to a film that introduces you to six or[…]
Welcome to the Modern World: Program Notes for a Michelangelo Antonioni- Jack Arnold Film Festival
“As much as the landscape is a character in It Came From Outer Space, it dominates Antonioni’s L’Avventura . . .” The surprising affinities between the careers of Italian “art film” director Michelangelo[…]
What Time Now? Catching Up Hours in Tsai Ming-liang
What is the best way of placing a body? The opening scenes of The River (1997) are spent trying to make a body move and work in a realistic way. A film[…]
Actors & Personalities · Artists · Directors · Interviews · Movies
What’s Wrong with Fast Food? A Conversation with Richard Linklater and Eric Schlosser on Fast Food Nation
With additional comments by Catalina Sandino Moreno and Ethan Hawke Introduction The distributor’s website describes Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, a dramatic feature based on Eric Schlosser’s best-selling book, as[…]
Artists · Directors · Interviews · Movies · Reviews
Returning to Life: Talking with Almodovar, Penelope Cruz, and Carmen Maura at Cannes
“I do not have the serenity of women. But I admire it.” Pedro Almodovar’s new film Volver (Return) features an unusual number of deaths. Penelope Cruz, in the best performance[…]
The Departed: Crime All the Time
Scorsese gets all Irish on our asses, and it works I admit it. I thought Marty had lost it. I thought he had gone all lazy and cute and Hollywood,[…]
“How My Brain Works”: An Interview with Michel Gondry
“I didn’t want to live under the shadow of other films. I want to exist on my own.” Introduction Like a mashup of cinematic countrymen Georges Melies and Jacques Tati,[…]
Acts of Revenge: Director Park Chan-wook Discusses Lady Vengeance and More
Grand Guignol, Korean style Introduction One of Korea’s most commercially successful young directors, Park Chan-wook is a polarizing figure in the disputatious world of international film circles. Though most acknowledge[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Abstract Film Palimpsests: On the Work of Rey Parla
pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the[…]
Death Becomes Him: Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion
In which Altman doesn’t go gentle into that good night Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in part on Garrison Keillor’s long-running radio show, observes the last stand of[…]
Woody Allen, Misanthropy, and Match Point: Or How Death Got the Last Laugh
Welcome to the “nihilistic message movie” “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve it by not dying.” . . . “I don’t mind dying,[…]
In Love with Liv Who Loves Life: Surviving Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf
“If the demons leave, maybe the angels will too” All happy artists — to subvert Tolstoy’s dictum about families — are different, each in their own way, but all unhappy[…]
The Lewton-Friedkin-Kubrick Connection
I saw William Friedkin’s Cruising for the first time in 25 years when it played on IFC recently. Having listened to Friedkin’s DVD audio commentary on Val Lewton’s The Leopard[…]
Notes on Naruse: An Auteur Ascends
Pitch-black pessimism, unsparing emotional truths, and women on the verge In the eighties, an impressive full-scale retrospective of Mikio Naruse’s films traveled the world and his reputation in the West[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews · LGBT & Queer · Visual Artists
Camping out with James Bidgood: The Auteur of Pink Narcissus Tells All
“I don’t live in a harem either, but well, God, I did for awhile …” Introduction My first viewing of Pink Narcissus (1971) took place in a Gay and Lesbian[…]
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