As in most gangster movies, character interest and plot interest are the same in A Prophet: a man’s identity is the moves he makes. Which is why the movie holds on as an investigation into who the main
One of the lures of the foreign-region disc lies in the "why wait?" ethos. Yes, the latest picture from the Dardenne brothers, which got a slightly less-than-entirely raptorous reception at last year
Photo by Fabrizio Maltese/EF Press/fabriziomaltese.com.
Hip-hip-hurray for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a ballsy B-movie riff off Bergman and Tarkovsky by way of Evil Dead that treads over the whole gamut of art-house clichés, was clearly improvised day in
Like Bresson, Melville, or Boetticher, Johnnie To makes movies about men surveying their possibilities to do a job, then doing it as neatly as possible—To’s method too, diagramming characters in a
Bong Joon-ho, in South Korea, is making the movies Hollywood should be making—formally precise and inventive, slyly engaging but never overturning popular genres, directed with sincerity and assurance
Dedicate a movie to one thing, respect the singular attention of the camera, and a film should be rich enough to overcome just about anything. Brillante Mendoza gives almost half of his film Kinatay
The weird thing about Bong Joon-ho’s Mother is that Bong keeps the thing back from burlesque exactly by going too far: a mother-loving idiot touching his mom’s breast as they curl up together at night
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