(I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time this year, resulting in my low output on this blog for the past two weeks. I will soon post a round-up and ranking of the films I saw.) The int...
If there was any doubt of the emotional infantilism and redundancy of Andrea Arnolds new and fiercely independent update to the classic novel Wuthering Heights, a tune by English pop-folk act Mumford...
For a director who pays fastidious attention to the politics, social trends, industries, and technologies of his milieus, its no small achievement that Steven Soderberghs films so often come across a...
Haunted by the ghosts of Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, Tommy Lee Jones only theatrical feature to date, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, is a strange, uneven neo-western whose slim storyline...
The projector performances of Bruce McClure have ever so gradually spawned a cultish reputation in avant-garde circles, their intense and in-your-face qualities demanding the attention of adventurous...
For the past two weeks I have been in the midst of production on my new film I Fell Silent, so film viewing has been pretty sparse. Directing requires a very stable internal space; its best not to le...
At the core of Todd Haynes Safe is the idea that the human body is a cage housing fragile, valuable material, and that its constantly threatened by the harsh and jagged environment around it. When th...
Bela Tarrs The Turin Horse would seem like The End even if the director himself hadnt boldly declared it his final feature. Brooding, angry, apocalyptic, and bathed in the kind of deadly seriousness ...
In the Val Lewton-produced, Jacques Tourneur-directed RKO horror classic I Walked with a Zombie, the "zombie" is chiefly a metaphor for the steady encroachment of a dark past, the messengers ...
One could imagine even Luis Buñuel, the famously scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, warming up to Whit Stillmans wry, patient debut Metropolitan, a film with an unapologetically affectionate perspec...
Luck (Episode 1 and 2) (2012): A beautiful case study of why I do not watch episodic dramatic television much is Luck, a new HBO horse-racing show which has so far produced two episodes, the first of...
In a cinematic culture where words, whether onscreen or via narration, are commonly ghettoized as paltry emotional shorthand and "visual storytelling" is trumpeted as the pinnacle of the art ...
My Night at Mauds is simultaneously one of the most accessible and thorniest of Eric Rohmers Six Moral Tales, exploring as it does the diverse philosophical terrain of a simple bourgeois love triangl...
For those readers who are unaware (which is probably all of you), Im a filmmaker as well as a critic. Ive made a whole bunch of short films in the past that are usually co-directed with a lifelong fr...
Boiled down to its essential actions, Robert Bressons final film LArgent might just resemble a bunch of people opening and closing doors and handing each other money and documents. However, through t...
From the moment its grimy, grainy, workmanlike opening shots of a mopey Liam Neeson trudging around a hellish Alaskan oil reserve tarnish the screen, Joe Carnahans The Grey boasts a strange texture f...
In its opening sequence of lovely, elegiac imagery and reflective voice-over, Aleksei Fedorchenkos Silent Souls succinctly evokes its central motifs: the decay of tradition, the tenacity of memory, a...
Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme recently happened to me. Happen is the right word not only because its robust and fractious sparring of image and sound pummeled me into a state of docile bliss, but...
Tokyo Sonata (2008): That so much of this film is eloquent, clever, and lovely makes its bombastic third-act derailing all the more disheartening. Kiyoshi Kurosawa manages at times to have an extreme...
The analog precursor to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoos endless barrage of digital facts and details can be found in Zodiac. Both films share the central conceit of a serial killer investigation and...
At this point, the material that spawned Stieg Larssons best-selling novel, a Swedish film adaptation, and now Hollywood pulp-whiz David Finchers version has been beaten to death, sucked of any eleme...
Barry Lyndon, despite its superficial appearance as a departure for the great director, is Stanley Kubricks immaculate, thought-provoking attempt to grapple with history, nature, storytelling, philos...
Its ironic given the increasing efficiency of international media transportation via means both cyber and televisual that I found myself so frustrated in 2011 by the dearth of films available to my e...
Focusing with unflinching directness on the unbreakable bond between a human being and his environment, Ben Rivers Two Years at Sea ultimately reinstates in 86 minutes both cinemas fundamental connec...
In the pivotal scene of Manoel de Oliveiras meditative, clear-eyed The Strange Case of Angelica, a curious detail emerges. A rural villages only photographer, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), is hired to snap ...
2011 proved to be the year of the solo musician. Eight of my top ten picks are solo artists, as well as fourteen of my top twenty overall. Granted, several of these musicians simply release music und...
Tomas Alfredsons Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy provides visual evidence of the significant distance between the impulses of literature and cinema. The tension between the two mediums tugs at every fra...
Both Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos and British director Steve McQueen have released massive international festival hits in the past few years: Dogtooth, a singularly unsettling allegorical black c...
Renowned for his mastery of the static long take, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien caused quite a stir in the critical film community when his camera first began to move in 1995’s Good Men, Good Wo...
Twenty years from now and henceforth, Lars Von Trier will be a fixture in surveys of film history. It’s hard to even say that about some of the greatest directors working today (of which I would not ...
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