Artifice is a kind of death, and also a new form of life, as, of course, art is about life (as much as certain objects are about life’s abstraction into—pace Gilles—concepts, precepts and affects
With 1967's Accident, American-born director Joseph Losey, who had been living and working in Europe since the early '50s after fleeing the Hollywood blacklist, seemed to solidify his reputation as a
As the ice of winter gradually cracks and melts into Spring—or, in the case of New York City, that day someone flips a switch and bitter cold transforms into intolerable heat—we can count our blessings
From Mario Peixoto's Limite (Brazil, 1931)
Above: Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg take a break at Adventureland. I thought of the new wave of Taiwanese films that began in the 1980s and peaked around the time of Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Puppetmaster
José Luis Guerin’s ode to voyeurism, In the City of Sylvia, opened in the UK last month with this perfectly evocative poster…
The Brooklyn Academy of Music ran a Carl Th. Dreyer retrospective, appropriately and monolithically titled DREYER, from March 13 - March 31. Here you will find my quick notes as I plunge in deep with the
The Interrogation (Bugajski, 1982): two shots of Krystyna Janda as a political prisoner, which remind me of Maria Falconetti in Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc.
"I should rub-a-dub!" The late work of Stanley Donen presents difficulties. The Little Prince (1973) strikes me as a kind of masterpiece, just not a very good one. As a children's film, it's wasted
Why windows? (Maybe there aren’t that many.) The Sun Shines Bright (1953), like so many John Ford movies, takes place in a small town; but while most of Ford’s towns are makeshift civilizations
Fritz Lang's 1955 Moonfleet might seem the least Langian of his films, at least to judge by a synopsis of its scenario. A young orphaned boy seeks out "a friend," commended to him by his late mother
Gina (Lilli Palmer) in Fritz Lang's Cloak and Dagger (1946). Cinematography by Sol Polito.