The weird thing about Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is that Bong keeps the thing back from burlesque exactly by going too far: a mother-loving idiot touching his mom’s breast as they curl up together at night
There’s one great image in Abrazos Rotos, and it’s straight from Godard’s Prenom Carmen: a hand, in silhouette, hovers over a blue, static TV screen. It’s not a great image because it’s pretty. Almodóvar
First, Ne change rien turns up the idea that most of Pedro Costa’s recent films are dress rehearsals. Where his major mentors, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, also film bodies possessed
Pinocchio: a sex doll comes to life, discovers she’s got a "heart." Amelie: But life, a heart, means a set tic, or routine (one character’s bulimic, another eats eggs every morning), ersatz characterization
The Weinstein Company on Quentin Tarantino.
Above: Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. “Late Films,” BAM’s new series is titled, as a series of neglected films made late in major directors’ careers, but as if the films themselves were
Nice barks pass for bites. Revanche tops a small strand of recent movie maybe best comparable to a series of bricks: a brick wall. The style develops out of Fassbinder, maybe, Warhol, or Dreyer’s Gertrud
Why windows? (Maybe there aren’t that many.) The Sun Shines Bright (1953), like so many John Ford movies, takes place in a small town; but while most of Ford’s towns are makeshift civilizations
Post-war, movies take notice—not for the first time, or last, but with the conviction that bearing witness can be an assault—of crowds and the weight of history. The two are intertwined, everyday concerns
Above: The Bride of Glomdale (1926). Image courtesy of The Danish Film Institute/Stills & Posters Archive. Almost all early Carl Th. Dreyer films show life to be one big ceremony, each generation
The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be running the Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, appropriately and monolithically titled DREYER, from March 13 - March 31. *** "What she learns is that love simply exists
The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be running the Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, appropriately and monolithically titled DREYER, from March 13 - March 31. *** "There were to be no horror scenes at all