Above: Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Pierre Melville's Léon Morin, Priest. Image courtesy Rialto Pictures. Father the French New Wave and how do you proceed? By casting the star of
From Samuel Fuller's 40 Guns (1957).
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