“I Used My Imagination”: Old Genres, New Jerusalems
What I find in Wim Wenders I find in William Blake (and all interesting artists): a desire for a better world that does not underestimate the difficulties of achieving it[…]
Category: Directors
Asian · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Being Human: An Interview with Hong Kong Filmmaker Cheung King-wai
Note: This interview was conducted in English during the Hong Kong International Film Festival in Sha Tin, Hong Kong, on 3 April 2016. The author wishes to thank Esther Yau,[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Berlinale Dispatch #1: Gianfranco Rosi Talks About Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare) (2016)
Editor’s note: This is the first of two interviews (next up: Nanni Moretti) our correspondent Amir Ganjavie conducted with directors at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival (Feb. 11-21). Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire[…]
Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer
Camping Out in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar! is not one of the Coens’ better films, but, because of its grab-bag of Hollywood silliness, it is perhaps the best at illuminating one of the main reasons[…]
Jurassic Parks: Stevie and the Dinosaurs
Spielberg, like many film directors, appears to be far more interested in film than life – interested in film, and interested in audiences, and how to move them through film.[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Silents
Nanook and Robert Flaherty: Father of Documentary Film – and More
Robert Flaherty and Alice Nevalinga (aka Nyla, the smiling one) were romantically involved – or as McLane modestly puts it, “he had an Eskimo female companion.” * * * In[…]
Dramas of Morality and Corruption: Sidney Lumet’s Police Quartet – Serpico, Prince of the City, Q&A, Night Falls on Manhattan
Taken as a quartet, these films shift from lauding the exposure of police corruption to struggling futilely against its pervasiveness. In Serpico and to a lesser extent Prince of the[…]
Asian · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
“A Different Space and Time”: Hou Hsiao-Hsien on The Assassin (2015)
Hou on The Assassin: I don’t believe we should blindly obey masters. Nie Yinniang is ordered by her master Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi) to kill a high-ranking official, but – once[…]
“A much more thoughtful and (is it possible?) more mature director”: Woody Allen at Eighty
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
Directors · Festivals & Awards
Thrilling and Horrifying: Bellocchio and De Palma at the Venice Film Festival 2015 (with Detours to Childhood of a Leader and Beasts of No Nation)
From the start of Blood of My Blood, we can sense the power that is contained within the mysterious malleability of light. Within a scene, some actions are clearly etched[…]
Ti West Is Pregnant (On the Low-Budget Auteur of The Roost, The Innkeepers, and House of the Devil)
A reluctant genre force who admits his pictures start out as regular films but turn into horror movies much the same way he describes the process of filmmaking itself as[…]
Directors · Interviews · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
“That’s something the viewer can choose to see.” An Interview with Mike Leigh on Mr. Turner
MIKE LEIGH: People have said to me, “Oh, I’m surprised Turner was like that, I would have thought he would be rather Byronic and beautiful and ascetic and nervously brilliant”[…]
Books · Directors · Interviews · Writers & Critics
Orson’s Charmed Circle of Fragments: A conversation with Josh Karp on his new book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of The Other Side of the Wind
I could begin to see how the movie was art imitating life and then morphed into life imitating art, with such a palpable sense of the greatest director who ever lived[…]
Directors · Interviews · Middle East
Iranian Independent Cinema, Its Challenges and Future: An Interview with Abdolreza Kahani
I have made films both in Iran and France, so I know the conditions. In France, when funding is given, there are no strings attached to it. You are free[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
“The World of the Road Is a State of Exception”: Boris Lojkine’s Hope Explores the World of African Migrants
Hope is the title, half ironic, half resolutely sincere, of a stunning film about African migrants trekking across a continent’s most forbidding landscapes to reach the promised land of Europe.[…]
A Woman of Paris: She’s a (Universal) Artist, and She Don’t Look Back
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour
Despite the reputation that Alain Resnais has garnered as “cinema’s definitive artist of postwar trauma,” few scholars have undertaken a detailed comparative analysis of his two works that broach this[…]
Directors · Production History
Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part II: The Safe House
Part I of this article told the story of how Orson Welles, while directing his legendary and never-finished Other Side of the Wind, took time out in early 1975 to[…]
Directors · Production History
Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part I: The Conspirators
2015 marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Orson Welles. Despite numerous biographies and critical studies, we are still piecing together the full story of his wild and complicated[…]
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Noir Improvisations: Two Men in Manhattan, Le Doulos, Le Deuxieme Souffle
First daring and experimental in an era of conformity, then classical in the age of the new wave, and finally nuanced and introspective when fashionable tastes ran radical and revolutionary[…]
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