It seems like one can trace a line back through movie male stardom, from Harrison Ford to Warren Beatty to, here, George Bancroft, of a kind of leading man who is, to put it kindly, dumb, dense as a pile
Above: The Master, Carl Th. Dreyer. *** The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be running a Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, appropriately and monolithically titled DREYER, from March 13 - March 31
What makes a film, or any work of art for that matter, avant-garde? Many of us do know that the literal translation of the French term means something along the lines of "ahead of its time," but very
With her acquisition of a Contessa camera and her nearly simultaneous marriage, from the outset the life of Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) in Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments begs a question as paramount
The trailer for Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road (2008) is particularly interesting because it utilizes one trend in contemporary trailers—relying on a pop song as a crutch to structure trailer rhythm, connote
Manohla Dargis on serious movies.
Above: Louis Garrel, behind the camera, and Laura Smet in front of it, in Philippe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn. SPOILERS TO FOLLOW. As if in warm-up for its upcoming Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, BAM
John M. Stahl's 1945 Leave Her To Heaven is a terrific film to spring on your less well-informed friends who think 1940s films, particularly 40s "women's pictures," as it were, are silly and trivial
DR. LIVINGSKELETON, I PRESUME? The Living Skeleton is a lot of fun, or at least, that was my experience, or I think it was. I have to couch things in the most uncertain terms, because
Above: Guy Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), which plays in the Film Comment Selects 2009 program. Credit: The Film Society of Lincoln Center / agnès b. The Film Comment Selects
Above: Emotional distance is spatial distance in F.W. Murnau's The Haunted Castle (1921). Sad, isn't it, to see John Ford and Frank Borzage honored so highly in 2007 and 2008 on home video with a lavish
There's one way in which Maurice Pialat's 1968 L'Enfance nue (Naked Childhood) fundamentally differs from the other two films about (male) childhood with which it otherwise stands pillar to pillar. Those