“We’ve avoided saying certain things. Why bring them up now?” – L’Eclisse “Two hearts, four eyes, Crying all day and all night/ Dark eyes, you cry because you can’t be[…]
The film withholds memory and history from us, always knowing more than us, plot-wise, but inviting and compelling our projection of how we fill the space of our own friendships.[…]
For a variety of reasons, then, despite its high-gloss finish, the film did not achieve any real commercial success. This is not to say it was an artistic letdown, as[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
What interests me (and I suspect, Assayas) is not so much the substance of these dinner table debates, which tend to move in predictable repeating circles, as their texture. People[…]
Drama · Music & Musicals · War
Suddenly jazz became a major taboo in Soviet society until Stalin’s death. In Western Europe, by contrast, mainly in Paris, jazz took off after the Nazis’ defeat in the hues[…]
“Lucky Grandma,” says Claire Baiz in her fifth Tribeca dispatch, “features richly layered characters in director Sasie Sealy’s homage to Chinatown that make this universal tale both reassuring and groundbreaking.”[…]
In her fourth report from the Tribeca Film Festival, Claire Baiz looks at first-time feature director Matt Ratner’s intriguing family drama Standing Up, Falling Down, which, as a thoughtful film[…]
“The root of oppression is loss of memory.” – Paula Gunn Allen1 * * * The end of the world is a mansion in the middle of the desert. A[…]
Drama · Historical & Epic · Women in Film
These women want their words to be heard. They want their will to be known. They want to be able to change their minds. And they want the full mind-body[…]
Even the languid pace Cuarón uses throughout the film seems to want to elevate the (feminine and domestic) virtue of soul-nurturing stillness over the (masculine) trait of destructive freneticism. Some[…]
Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]
“All the things we should’ve said that I never said/ All the things we should’ve done that we never did/ All the things we should’ve given but I didn’t/ Oh,[…]
Comedy · Counterculture · Drama
Everyone in Shampoo is id driven, with the audience taking voyeuristic pleasure at the absence of any self-awareness. George is inarticulate and largely passive, more preyed upon than preying with[…]
The Prince: “I haven’t yet had a report from your office. What’s your work like?” The Warden: “Every night the same. Every night till the heart beats as if it[…]
Theirs is a passive outlook, young men products of a culture that for too many generations has grown to depend on a corporate entity, mistaking the mill for a permanent,[…]
Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959); The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960); Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960); A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961); The Loneliness of[…]
Nearly fifty years after its release, it’s clear Midnight Cowboy pulled off a neat trick. Its story of a naïve “Texas longhorn bull” hustler and a low-rent con man is[…]
