Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Can a film’s designer be its effective auteur? He can, if his name is William Cameron Menzies. Menzies is best known for directing and designing two classics of the science[…]
“Art, entertainment, and genuine fear and tragedy rarely all filter down into a deceptively ‘normal American family film’ with such quiet desperation.”
Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
“The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans.”
“Traditional gender roles seem to be in no danger of evolving.”
“Like any old-style modernist, Haneke likes to make the audience work.”
In this nimble version of Anton Chekhov’s eponymous short story, aristocrat Ivan Laevsky (Andrew Scott), and his married mistress Nadya (Fiona Glascott) have decamped from Moscow to the Black Sea.[…]
“Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.” – Peter Steele (1962-2010) From here comes a rich smell drawn from a load of bullshit. And in no way am I demeaning the practice of street art by[…]
No one with eyes and a brain could seriously dispute Nicholas Ray’s role as the primary auteur of Bigger Than Life. All you need to do is watch Ray’s Rebel[…]
Recently retired law clerk Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo DarÃn) can’t shake the memory of the 1974 Morales rape and murder case. Never mind that 25 years have passed: for Benjamin, the[…]
When asked about the John Hughes films in a recent NY Times interview, John Cusack played the highbrow card. Besides Sixteen Candles, in which he had a minor role, Cusack[…]
The unpredictable, occasionally thrilling New Directors / New Films fest opens in New York City today. Locals are, of course, the immediate beneficiaries of this annual collaboration between the Film[…]
“Traditional gender roles seem to be in no danger of evolving.” Simone de Beauvoir laid it out in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” Indeed,[…]
Music & Musicals · Reviews · Uncategorized
If the brief stardom of Buddy Holly and the even briefer star of Ritchie Valens should get the Hollywood biopic treatment, then why not the first all-girl balls-out rock act?[…]
If you want an idea of real Roman life, look no further than Mid-August Lunch (2008). Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio, who directed, scripted and stars) and his 93-year-old mother Valeria[…]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mi2Dusyg5A In a film career that spanned more than half a century, the late Peter Graves (1926-2010) was a dependable leading man, often at his best in non-leading roles, who[…]
Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann likes to capture rooms and the lives within. His camera remains stable or abruptly shifts, as if just discovering the element central to the layout. At[…]
What Jacksin’s doin’ with line and cullah goes beyond abstrackshin.
Photo Essays · Reviews · Silents
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his[…]
