Directors · Interviews · Middle East
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[…]
What’s in the bag is Marcello Clerici, and the bag, not surprisingly, is empty. * * * Upon its release in 1970, how many of us were prepared for The[…]
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
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.[…]
Every failure, every road not taken is a Gone Girl all its own, Regular Amy’s story a machine for the draining away of these idealizations till she and we are[…]
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[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Reviews
In a recent interview, the English filmmaker Adam Curtis described finding “hidden levels in the BBC archive” where a vast collection of extraneous footage has been accumulating over the last[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · War
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[…]
Adam, a vampire and underground rock musician, sneaks down the quiet corridors of a Detroit hospital, dressed in a physician’s scrubs with his face concealed by a surgical mask and[…]
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · War
Angelina Jolie may be among our best hopes to end the cruel and vile practice of mass rape in conflict. She has a bully pulpit as a rich and famous[…]
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[…]
A self-confessed conjurer, Bergman’s films are tricky in every sense. What makes these movies so difficult is what makes life itself difficult – the overwhelming desire to know the unknowable,[…]
Now she is finally able to “see” him back, to acknowledge the impact of her actions on another who cares for her, to accept their mutual obligations, and to entertain[…]
Drama · LGBT & Queer · New Media
“Let us try to focus all our energy and all of our love on these two men, George and Ben.” “Always, always, you must focus on the instrument you are[…]
Directors · Drama · Reviews · Writers & Critics
That Anderson chose to adhere so closely to the novel indicates a lack of desire to transform or elevate the work, and, regardless of whether or not this was motivated[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground
Decasia is a “horror film” in which the horror it presents as the corruption imposed by time on what people create is also an unavoidable part of the world we[…]
The Babadook presents a normative vision of what it believes is a stable, happy existence, one in which if our emotions are difficult to bear, we simply lock them in[…]
The continuing attention being showered on Jennifer Kent’s 2014 The Babadook from horror luminaries such as Stephen King and William Friedkin has prompted some impressive critical writing, while simultaneously anchoring[…]
Sometimes, the personal angle offers the clearest view. Now and then, the authorial “we” must be abandoned in favour of a more open-handed, first-person approach. Therefore, I’ll begin by saying[…]
