Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title emerging…
The competing modes of The Tsugua Diaries result in the sense of one film slapped upon another, Gomes’ adventurousness sacrificed in the name of the contemporaneous. The…
Fatherly guardedness is what defines Jean-René Etangsalé in the memory of his daughter, filmmaker and documentarian Erika Etangsalé. His being tight-lipped, however, was more a…
Los conductos is a disarmingly personal film that is also masterful in its understanding of the way artifice interacts with realism. Camilo Restrepo has made a…
One of the most paradoxically romantic scenes in any film ever can be found in Alexander Mackendrick’s second film for Ealing Studios, 1951’s The Man…
By the time of Taboo’s 1999 release, after a 13-year period of filmic silence, Nagisa Ôshima had already released what could be considered two capstone…
So Cold the River’s successfully unnerves for a while, but ultimately gives into to more gauche and bloody flourishes. Horror likes to look backward, the…
Black Crab is a mishmash of apocalyptic signifiers and sci-fi recency without ever establishing much of a core. The world has ended a few times over…
On the set of 1946’s Duel in the Sun, King Vidor was constantly assailed by a positively megalomaniacal David O. Selznick, who extrapolated new subplots…
“A little more passion, though, would have been appreciated.” So says Dave Kehr of American — by way of London by way of France —…
#6. Visual rhymes preside over the three, tenuously interlinked sections of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, drawing parallels across earthbound stories that have the…
#1. For something so ostensibly classical, it still feels like you’re smacking your head against a wall of varying superficial shorthand terms when trying to…
The Tragedy of Macbeth is masterful in its fusing of the artificial and elemental, a bit of Shakespearean subterfuge that justifies this umpteenth take on the eponymous…
Spielberg’s authorship is distinctly felt in this version of West Side Story, and more than in the original, it here truly feels as if life…
The First Wave isn’t much more than an ornamental object, pointlessly self-assured in its distasteful aesthetic manipulations. The compartmentalization that contemporary documentary tends to engender —…
Zeros and Ones’ study of violence and digitality is the latest proof that Ferrara thrives in the spaces between knuckleheaded obviousness and total abstraction. A…
Bulletproof is a Wiseman-like doc of observation and contrast, refusing sensationalism and impressively navigating its slippery material. Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof is a present-tense documentary, not at…
The Velvet Underground proves an interesting resting place for a litany of period detritus, but stumbles when foregrounding its titular subjects. Todd Haynes, a noted semiotician,…
In Ste. Anne, Rhayne Vermette strives to imbue narrative filmmaking with as much tangible texture as possible, even if that means freely disrupting said narrative…
Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn,…
Who You Think I Am attempts to speak to our current Internet age, but mines only shallowly with its picked-over storytelling mode. Juliette Binoche, for nearly…