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.
In Doctor & Peterson’s Up: it can even be found in the trailer, but there’s a marvelous shot of a young girl and her room bathed in a translucent rainbow of light as the fleet of balloons pass outside
Tetro sees an artist coming out of his hibernation; still groggy and a little stiff in the joints, we can nonetheless recognize a welcome return of an American cinema of characters, of adults, and of
“You’ll kill his body, I’ll condemn his soul,” says a priest to a cop about Jose Mojica Marins’ diabolic character “Coffin Joe,” but this may well be a statement by Marins about the cinema itself. Too
Impressionism in the cinema is a volatile, tricky technique, as it strives to give a sense of something rather than the thing itself. To pull off something like Mann’s Miami Vice, Malick’
New York's Museum of Modern Art continues its Julien Duvivier retrospective all through May, bringing to light dozens of dazzling films from this neglected master. La Bandera (1935) is a relatively modest
Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.
Pixar’s latest film Up (in 3-D!) is the animation studio’s simplest, truest, and strangest film yet. For the sake of sentimental fancy, it jettisons depth for flashes of brightest melancholy, and
Above: the longest sequence in the world, the ribald carnival scene in Tom. Credit: Ken Jacobs. Above: not three dimensions but two: flattened faces. Credit: Ken Jacobs. Above: one of the most
The following are fragments of a consideration of the Eureka!/MOC Region 2 U.K. DVD of the Godard film named above. In a recent comments thread on Dave Kehr's website, the critic Kent Jones, his frustration