Epilogue '08 is the final chapter of the year 2008. An online roundtable looking back one last time on the past year in films, after 2008 came to a close and every year-end poll and commentary has been
John Ford mourns the Western as a spectral soundstage (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Sam Peckinpah goes outside to revive it, or at least give it a decent Viking funeral. The geriatric lawman (Joel
Made in USA is, like about all Godard’s works, just a documentary of a time, of some places, of some people. A home movie bearing witness to 1967, politically, personally—and the two, here, are
The Crystals' "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" was not quite the last gasp of a certain strain of masochism in popular culture...but it can be usefully cited as probably the last time said strain
"It's much easier to run a hospital with all the patients sleeping." “Easiest way to run the world, for that matter.” The Final Programme (1973), also known as The Last Days of Man on Earth, has a reasonable
"The angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy."— Douglas Sirk We do not have to believe Sirk—we may desire to replace “the director” with “the film” for our purposes—but
When Terence Davies' voice is first heard in his new film Of Time And The City, anyone who's never heard him speak before may be a little surprised. It is an uncommonly deep voice—authoritative, mellifluous
The first in a continuing series on the films of Frederick Wiseman. "On the night of December 6th, police shot 15-year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in cold blood in the Eksarhia district of Athens
I had intended to begin this appraisal of the film by discussing an impulse in late '60s British cinema (and, to a lesser extent, literary fiction; c.f. Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman) to break
Above: Marcello Di Falco (center right) as Cosimo de' Medici. Credit: Courtesy of the Criterion Collection. Roberto Rossellini must have looked at the state of cinema in 1972 and shuddered at the artifice
Documentary is the falsest sort of cinema. Reality has value only when it is transposed…
Ever since Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's films have all had the same look, the same feel: studies in gray palette of a world filled with people being drained, pulled ever so slowly away from life