The Hardcore Western Fan is an increasingly rare breed. And you shall know them by their high regard for Zane Gray. And their patronage of the Lone Pine Film Festival, held at the fantastically scenic
An image common to 1930s Hollywood cinema, most notably in the American films of Fritz Lang: that of an impoverished man or woman gazing longingly in the shopping windows of a big city. On the other side
I 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
A 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
First 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
Interning 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
Otto 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
The 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
Jean-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
Since we're currently missing a Links section on the Notebook, I thought I'd periodically link to some of our favorite websites for the online cinephile. The Self-Styled Siren has always been a must
In 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
Is 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