When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie…
Imagine my surprise when a cursory online search revealed that virtually no critic of note has written a modern reassessment of the 1986 serial-killer-road-movie cum neo-western The Hitcher. Barely released into theaters, the film was a financial failure and was roundly eviscerated by critics —…
“You say you’re under a curse – well so what? So’s the whole damn world.” In a darkened cave, miles away from Ashitaka’s home, a wandering monk/mercenary shares food with the young traveler before this exchange. For Ashitaka, a warrior-prince and the last scion…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic and the soul — from two, one. The lovers themselves, though, know something no one else does: they see the…
It took legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty 19 years after his barnstorming 1973 debut film, Touki Bouki, to deliver his sophomore film. Hyenas, released in 1992, is loosely based on Fredrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play “The Visit,” and it would ultimately prove the final…
After three title cards – “DOG STAR MAN,” “BY BRAKHAGE,” “PRELUDE” – written in an esoteric font, we spend nearly a full minute with a continuously moving, dim burgundy screen. Small splashes of momentary indigo make their way into the frame for nanoseconds, brief…
Observed through a crystalline lens of deadpan gentility, Whit Stillman’s charming 1990 comedy of manners, Metropolitan, is a timeless tale of a bygone era. Stillman paints a world where teenagers catch trains in tuxedos and opine unironically about the merits of local versus international…
Despite winning the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore was controversial enough to be dismissed at the time of its release as empty salaciousness by both adversarial audiences and critics. Fortunately, over the years much…
Pedro Costa has long been celebrated for his loose Fontainhas trilogy, a series of docu-fiction hybrids made in collaboration with residents of the former Lisbon slum (it’s now been demolished). These are great films, of course, but like all artists, Costa did not stumble…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of Hollywood filmmaking. Twister revived the moribund eco-disaster picture, while Mission: Impossible gave global superstar Tom Cruise his very own (ongoing) action franchise. The…
