Who Do You Love? Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game Reconsidered
Was Le Grande Jean too soft on the aristos?
Category: Drama
Stunted Lives: On 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days
Unsettling and unmissable
When Virtue Sleeps: The Moral World of Denys Arcand’s L’Âge des Ténèbres
“We are asked to think morally: is the happiness these characters seek possible or desirable?”
God Is Dead, or Through a Glass Darkly: On Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
Jon Halliday’s indispensable Sirk on Sirk has confirmed what Sirk’s admirers and students had long suspected: that his films are not all equally “personal,” and that he had a much[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow
“Once upon a time in sunny California” reads a title card immediately after the credits for Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. “Once upon a time” triggers an expectation of a fairy[…]
Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Doing What Moves Them at the Moment: Five of Cassavetes’ Best on DVD
The master of improv gets his due courtesy of Criterion’s extras-laden box set
Drama · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Plumbing the Depths: Renoir and Kurosawa Do Gorky
Criterion’s double-feature DVD features two minor works by two major auteurs
Sideways: Sideways to Hell, Maybe!
Alexander Payne’s new indie is headed in the wrong direction
Mike Leigh’s 20th Century Snaps: Vera Drake and Naked
Two sides of the same desperate coin
Martha, Interrupted: Fassbinder’s 1974 Masterpiece on DVD
“You’re always wanting to touch me!”
Secrets and Lives: Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake
“We know what we are, but not what we may be
Millions Like Us: Bereavement in British Cinema
“All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”
Drama · Experimental & Underground
Dogville: Or Lars von Trier’s New Old Testament
On the seventh day … he should have kept working
Drama · Experimental & Underground
Dogville: Or How Not to Discover America
Von Trier’s America may be too cartoonish for its own good
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
Above the Revolution: The Dreamers and Alienation
“With my memories I have lit a fire.”
They Can’t Give You Anything but Love: Robert Aldrich’s Grissom Gang on DVD
Of course, it’ll cost you
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