Above: Mélanie Laurent veils herself in Inglourious Basterds Fairy tale from the start, complete with a little big bad wolf (or hawk, as it is) sent to blow a house down, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious
Many critics, who know Hayao Miyazaki is a world-class entertainer and that American audiences are still clueing into that fact, seem determined to frame Ponyo as the filmmaker’s latest masterpiece
Spread is the story of a character who discovers that he has no depth. He might’ve been a person once, but then he became an actor and soon even the acting disappeared and all that remained was
Here's the difference between Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To in three similar images: Tsui's is a cinema of objects; even bodies are things. Character exists in the dialogue, but on the screen
"A lot of things are going wrong today. It's just not my day," says the carpet salesman before he starts to weep. The joke, of course, is that no one ever has their day. Jokes, punchlines, gags – they
The dream of the lightweight camera is to be able to go anywhere and capture any image. Of all the dreams films and film production have provided us with, it's the one we've followed through the least
Paper Soldier, dealing as it does with the early days of the Soviet space program (post-Sputnik, pre-manned flight) stands as a sort of interesting companion film to Philip Kaufman's The Right
Andrea Arnold's follow-up to her acclaimed Red Road (2006), follows also in the footsteps of Alan Clarke, director of films and BBC plays, whose influence has spread out in strange ways since his untimely
Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin continues his journey into the avant-garde world of Five Dedicated to Ozu, his 2003 excursion into long take minimalist cinematography. Ostensibly the film presents shots of
What do we do with Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, another version of John Godey’s book (also adapted in 1974 by Joseph Sargent), and an old-school picture of conventional urban crime in an
At what point does gleeful cynicism become so gleeful that it ceases to function as cynicism at all, and mutates into a blatant formalist trope of little emotional or intellectual resonance, but plenty
Above: Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience. Steven Soderbergh's a difficult figure to pin down, because he's both approachable and completely elusive. As a man who usually serves as his own cinematographer