Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
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“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
“The good news from Bellamy is that Depardieu gives one of his best performances in years.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
“While a teen’s emotional landscape can indeed defy reason, the filmmakers insist that a teenager’s need to attack supersedes any moral dilemma, even if their behavior results in the expulsion of one of their peers.”
Will the real cult film please stand up?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df1CGxqS1MA] Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average[…]
Classic films come about through a lucky combination of accident and inspiration. In the case of THE GODFATHER, one of writer/director Francis Coppola’s most inspired choices was to model his film not on[…]
To wrap up her gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe explained away her supernatural trappings at the conclusion. Imagine a story that explains away its action in every scene. Hitchcock was heavy-handed when[…]
Dogtooth is an audaciously visceral statement that somehow avoids both flamboyance and gratuity, proving that on-screen shocks need not always be accompanied by a masturbatory aftertaste.
Talk about wish fulfillment for kids – the Airbender mythos has it nailed. As a child dreams of gaining superpowers, he may wish for them all: i.e, the numerous abilities of[…]
Beyond the Forest Dir. King Vidor, 1949 In America, the tagline read “Nobody’s As Good As Bette When She’s Bad.” In French they simply called it La Garce, ‘the bitch.’[…]
I wonder about those who can watch Jarmusch any time. They must really love life’s randomness, how we must create order in what can be a pretty disordered universe. They[…]
Double Take Dir. Johan Grimonprez The documentary Double Take is bookended by two of the scariest moments in American history: the launch of Sputnik and the release of The Birds.[…]
Call this a western exploitation film. Jonah Hex, based on a comic book series of the same name, has much more action than thought or sense. It borrows from the[…]
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice[…]
The Dark House (Dom ZÅ‚y) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den,[…]
Festivals & Awards · TV & Streaming
And how can you not love that Tom Cruise has made the foul-mouthed coked-up Jewish producer-type into a stock comic expression of nothing less than the highest level of Nietzschean ubermenschood in the form of his TROPIC THUNDER role, Les Grossman?
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
The Miscreants of Taliwood, dir. George Gittoes Nénette, dir. Nicolas Philibert I recently spent a week at the Warsaw Documentary Film Festival. The two films that made the deepest impression[…]
