"Chungking Express": The Blu-ray
Glenn KennyI have to admit: when I learned that among the first Blu-ray releases from Criterion would be their newly remastered version of Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 Chungking Express, I was slightly puzzled. Don't get
Criticism
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Now on DVD: "Camp de Thiaroye" (Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, 1987)
AcquarelloA historical fiction based on the Thiaroye transit camp massacre in 1944, Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow's Camp de Thiaroye dismantles the myth of colonial assimilation to expose ingrained social
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Tuesday Morning Foreign (But Not Foreign Region) DVD Report: "An American in Paris" (MInnelli, 1951; Japanese Blu-ray)
Glenn KennyFirst things first: forgive these less-than-ideal screen captures. They were taken with a camera off of a monitor, and your reporter is still learning how to do such things properly. He will probably
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NYFF08: More Highlights and Lowlights of “Views from the Avant-Garde," part III
David PhelpsInterning at MoMA this past summer, I took one afternoon to help avant-garde expert Scott MacDonald go through some of the museum’s rare Bruce Conner holdings in preparation for a then-upcoming
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A Washington kind of a lie: Preminger’s "Advise & Consent"
Fernando F. CroceOtto Preminger would have been fascinated by the results of this year’s Presidential election. A nation that can elect its first black president while denying gays the right to marry is the kind of dilemma
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NYFF08: More Highlights and Lowlights of “Views from the Avant-Garde," part II
David PhelpsThe two short highlights (Conners, Dorskys excluded): landscape films. In Pat O’Neill’s Horizontal Boundaries, a flurry of tableaux, stripes (like a flag’s) of Los Angeles sidelines and signs adrift in
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Jean-Daniel Pollet
Dan SallittJean-Daniel Pollet’s oeuvre is weirdly divided into chilly, precise art films and lowbrow sentimental comedies. Hard to think offhand of another filmmaker with a similar split personality. The art films
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Why so serious, Mister Bond?
Glenn KennyIn his review last week of the latest Bond film, Quantum of Solace, New York Times critic A.O. Scott notes that the Daniel Craig incarnation of Agent 007, occasional zinger aside, seems to lack in the
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Peering within the Christmastime whirlwind
Daniel KasmanIs there any pleasure in nitpicking—let alone deriding—an admirable film? I suppose there are better targets than Arnaud Desplechin's hyper-melodrama A Christmas Tale: reprehensible cinema that degrades
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NYFF08: More highlights and lowlights of “Views from the Avant-Garde," part I
David PhelpsShorts program one of Views from the Avant-Garde was entitled “The Warmth of the Sun”—for AG’s Emersonian vein of wind in the trees, shadows in the water, mountains in the sky? So it seemed with Ben Rivers’
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Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "The Offence" (Lumet, 1972)
Glenn KennyAs it happens, the director Sean Connery has worked most frequently with is SIndey Lumet. Their collaborations were 1965's intense WWII prison drama The Hill, 1971's breezy heist pic The Anderson Tapes
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An amber kaleidoscope: "Lola Montes" (Ophüls, 1955)
Ryland Walker KnightMore a gem than a crystal, Lola Montes begins looking up at twin chandeliers so baroque that their descending shudder makes one think the little globs of glass dangling will break free and fall to the