The first in a continuing series on the films of Frederick Wiseman. "On the night of December 6th, police shot 15-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in cold blood in the Eksarhia district of Athens
I had intended to begin this appraisal of the film by discussing an impulse in late '60s British cinema (and, to a lesser extent, literary fiction; c.f. Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman) to break
Above: Marcello Di Falco (center right) as Cosimo de' Medici. Credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Roberto Rossellini must have looked at the state of cinema in 1972 and shuddered at the artifice
Documentary is the falsest sort of cinema. Reality has value only when it is transposed…
Ever since Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's films have all had the same look, the same feel: studies in gray palette of a world filled with people being drained, pulled ever so slowly away from life
Above: Patrick McGoohan (far left) and Stanley Baker (right). Four decades on, Hell Drivers (Endfield, UK, 1957) still works as a no-nonsense action thriller, and an ideal vehicle for its star, Stanley
And freedom, when everything’s fenced into place? All that Heaven Allows Godard has two answers, at least. Certainly, there’s a worry, as in Oshima and Kubrick movies, that doubling—one character reflected
The First Part Andrzej Zulawski swings his camera like a steel fist. Indeed, right at the start of his first feature, The Third Part of the Night (1971), after a soldier on horse back has ridden right
Atlantic City (Made in USA’s Paris suburb theme park), 1967, and the revolutionaries, like filmmakers, are dreamers. Dreaming, if they’re the nouveaux réalistes or the situationists, of tearing down reality
Looking at The Comfort of Strangers nearly 20 years after its release, and shortly after the death of its screenwriter Harold Pinter, one is, first off, inclined to rue the fact that Pinter and director
2009 has - as we know - only just started, but I for one will be pleasantly surprised if the year yields a more informative, entertaining, skilfully-written piece on cinema than Christoph Huber's interview
Barack Obama lists these films as some of his favorites. We usually think one's personal tastes are an insight into who they are. Do these say something about US' President-elect? (Source: Obama's Facebook