Quote of the day
Daniel KasmanThat's just a bit too much Simmons" -Jean Simmons, after a clip reel including Great Expectations, Hamlet, Angel Face, and Elmer Gantry, at her tribute at the 2008 Telluride Film Festival.We say: there
August 2008
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Letters from Venice - I
Boyd van HoeijAbove: Guillermo Arriaga’s directorial debut, The Burning Plain.(Some light spoilers)If the competition titles at the 65th Venice Film Festival are anything to go by, then linear narratives have now
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Some highlights of the Kawakita Series
David Phelps“Man has created death.” —YeatsSome highlights from a few new wave poster-boys—for whom society is always collapsing, as well it should, with the only change and revolution to be found in irrational destruction
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Now in theaters: "Sukiyaki Western Django" (Miike Takashi, Japan)
Daniel KasmanPastiche rides the high frontier in Miike Takashi's Sukiyaki Western Django, a film that strips the Kill Bill model of genre spoof down just to referents, quotes, and iconography, leaving strewn along
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New Punk Cinema, rowing against the tradition of film as a commodity
Halim CillovIn their famous essay, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1947), the acclaimed Frankfurt School philosophers and art critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno criticize the various products and aims of the
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Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "The Round-Up" (Jancso, Hungary, 1966)
Glenn KennyIn his latest novel Lush Life, Richard Price frequently depicts the NYPD’s “Quality of Life Task Force” doing some “Night Fishing on Delancey”—pulling over suspect-looking cars and drivers, and on discovery
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Now on DVD: "Human Lanterns" (Sun, Hong Kong, 1982)
Daniel KasmanThe magnificent artifice of the Shaw Brothers studio films, at their most heightened, could be truly splendorous, exultant in the pastel glow of sublimely detailed, sprawling interiors of happiness and
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Image of the day
Daniel KasmanFrom Secret Beyond the Door (1948); directed by Fritz Lang; cinematography by Stanley Cortez:
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Now on DVD: "Vampyr" (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)
AcquarelloFilmed during the transition from silent to sound, Vampyr also represents a creative transition for Carl Theodor Dreyer. Having ended his association with Société Général de Films, the production company
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Image series: The agony and the ethics
Daniel KasmanRobert Aldrich (Kiss Me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen) has never been about pre-made rules, or a world where morals and behavior are measured by a set standard. There is a reason why so many of Alrich's movies
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Monday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Lancelot du Lac" (Bresson, France, 1974)
Glenn KennyEven by director Robert Bresson’s exacting, idiosyncratic standards, his 1974 Lancelot du Lac is a peculiar film. The picture begins with a shot unlike anything he had put on celluloid before. Two knights
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September's essential cinema: New York's MoMA
Daniel KasmanBela Tarr's The Man from London, September 22-26Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, September 24-29Carl Th. Dreyer's Gertrud, September 25-28