Hong Sang-soo’s new film is not what I expected at all. His last three (Tale of Cinema, Woman on the Beach, and Night and Day) all seemed subtle but substantial evolutions of a filmmaker unjustly
In The Molly Maguires: the opening shot, a deeply zoomed picture of the sun, then has the camera slowly pan and reverse zoom so that the monolithic, artificially looming buildings of the mine suddenly
There’s one great image in Abrazos Rotos, and it’s straight from Godard’s Prenom Carmen: a hand, in silhouette, hovers over a blue, static TV screen. It’s not a great image because it’s pretty. Almodóvar
Considering all his talk about work, the value of it as well as its humility, and especially how making movies is work too—good work, by ardent workers–it is hard to believe that Pedro Costa hasn’t made
The emphasis on observation in the recent upsurge Romanian cinemas has, in the films I’ve seen, always been a style and not a commentary. Corneliu Porumboiu’s enthralling Politist, Adjectiv changes
While in Cannes we are eagerly anticipating the upcoming screening of the World Cinema Foundation's restoration of Edward Yang's terrifically hard to see masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day later in the
First, Ne change rien turns up the idea that most of Pedro Costa’s recent films are dress rehearsals. Where his major mentors, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, also film bodies possessed
Moustaches, miners, and anti-industry terrorism: we have our first masterpiece from Cannes. Martin Ritt’s 1970 The Molly Maguires, a breath of There Will Be Blood but focusing not on an individual
The amazing Art of the Modern Movie Poster, a 500-page treasure-chest of postwar film poster design published by Chronicle Books and the good folks at Posteritati, deservedly devotes a whole section
Here is the ideal Park Chan-wook film: one man and one woman beat and torture one another, each one having a go until the other is so badly hurt that, in theory, the audience wants to see the victim
Pinocchio: a sex doll comes to life, discovers she’s got a "heart." Amelie: But life, a heart, means a set tic, or routine (one character’s bulimic, another eats eggs every morning), ersatz characterization
Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.