Murnau on DVD: "City Girl" (1930)
Daniel KasmanTurning from the grand, sweet allegory of Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), F.W. Murnau unknowingly had only three more films in him before his tragic, early death. Between that most excellent of
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Image of the day
Daniel KasmanA teasingly beautiful introduction to The Notebook's upcoming coverage of the new DVD boxset, Murnau, Borzage and Fox.From City Girl (1930); directed by F.W. Murnau; production design by Edgar G. Ulmer;
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Samuel Fuller's "White Dog": Natural is not in it.
Ryland Walker KnightAn allowance for irrationality forges the difference between a shrewd and a calculating eye. This arrangement (of facts, of phenomena, of the empirical) is what makes good science; it’s what raises science
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Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report: "Alice In The Cities" (Wenders, 1974)
Glenn KennyThe way we experience any given film changes over time, sometimes in ways maybe imperceptible to us. Other times, not. A lot depends sometimes on where the film was set and shot, and our own relation to
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pages from a cold island: DON'T TRUST THE STARS
Neil YoungNonso Anozie - in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) - has only a single scene as Ezra, the charismatic, gently-spoken chiropractor who sorts out the heroine's dodgy back. But in the same way as Ezra near
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Our Budd: Why Boetticher Is One Director Hardcore Western Fans And Cinephiles Can Agree On
Glenn KennyThe Hardcore Western Fan is an increasingly rare breed. And you shall know them by their high regard for Zane Gray. And their patronage of the Lone Pine Film Festival, held at the fantastically scenic
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Image of the day
Daniel KasmanAn image common to 1930s Hollywood cinema, most notably in the American films of Fritz Lang: that of an impoverished man or woman gazing longingly in the shopping windows of a big city. On the other side
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"Chungking Express": The Blu-ray
Glenn KennyI have to admit: when I learned that among the first Blu-ray releases from Criterion would be their newly remastered version of Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 Chungking Express, I was slightly puzzled. Don't get
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Now on DVD: "Camp de Thiaroye" (Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow, 1987)
AcquarelloA historical fiction based on the Thiaroye transit camp massacre in 1944, Ousmane Sembène and Thierno Faty Sow's Camp de Thiaroye dismantles the myth of colonial assimilation to expose ingrained social
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Tuesday Morning Foreign (But Not Foreign Region) DVD Report: "An American in Paris" (MInnelli, 1951; Japanese Blu-ray)
Glenn KennyFirst things first: forgive these less-than-ideal screen captures. They were taken with a camera off of a monitor, and your reporter is still learning how to do such things properly. He will probably
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NYFF08: More Highlights and Lowlights of “Views from the Avant-Garde," part III
David PhelpsInterning at MoMA this past summer, I took one afternoon to help avant-garde expert Scott MacDonald go through some of the museum’s rare Bruce Conner holdings in preparation for a then-upcoming
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A Washington kind of a lie: Preminger’s "Advise & Consent"
Fernando F. CroceOtto Preminger would have been fascinated by the results of this year’s Presidential election. A nation that can elect its first black president while denying gays the right to marry is the kind of dilemma