Above: Laura Smet (left) and Louis Garrel (right) as the the first pair of lovers in Philippe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn. Philippe Garrel's cinema—which tends towards the suicidal—questions whether everything
Above: Michelle Williams as Wendy. Remember the utter destitution of Old Joy's final scene, Will Oldham ejected from a deep, but expired and uncomfortable friendship into the unforgiving city streets
Above: A studio production still unintentionally captures the Borzage essence, two lovers, Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur, transcendentally alone in their bliss. "Is it something like love?" "It is
Above: Vero (María Onetto) in one of the film's many emblematic, ghostly uses of foreground and background in its compositions. Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel (The Holy Girl, La Ciénaga) curls
Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly described Jim Jarmusch's 1995 film Dead Man as an "acid western," but I wonder if he had known that Wong Kar-wai beat Jarmusch to the punch in 1994 with his acid wuxia, Ashes
Some stories are told so many times there is no longer any need for words. Albert Serra understands this. His digitalized, elliptical, nature-bound adaptation of Quixote, Honor de cavalleria, and now
Above: Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) with one of his two lovers, Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). James Gray has exactly what American cinema needs—sincerity. Gray deals in melodrama—and male melodrama at that—but
It is easy to forget that the cinema is but light and shadow, and for such a simple admission, it takes someone like Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to remind us of this vital fact.Le Genou d'Artemide
Produced as part of what I believe is a series of films for television on rural French life, Raymond Depardon's La Vie moderne (Modern Life) seems very fresh to these American eyes—a film that takes an
Above: Farrel (Juan Fernandez) disembarks to visit his family in the mountains. "Anywhere but here" is the common phrase, but Liverpool's variation seems to be "anywhere but anywhere." Lisandro Alonso
A style in flux can produce the most interesting, though not necessarily the most complete work. Jia Zhangke's recent documentary forays—Dong and Useless—seemed to point towards the versatile, contemplative
As Bright Future suggested before, Kurosawa Kiyoshi's sensibility can tap personal discord as easily as it usually tapped a horror-like, apocalyptic atmosphere in his genre movies; and now Tokyo Sonata