Hal Hartley occupies a curious position in the American film scene. While he might reasonably be called an icon of the independent film scene and has remained a fixture of prestigious film festivals like Sundance and Cannes since the late 1980s, he has never…
Brian De Palma is the great voyeur, the plump-bellied pervert, of American cinema. His films have a singularly sleazy feel, gloriously gaudy and admirable in their ribald ridiculousness. Consider the high school girls shot in salacious slow-motion in the beginning of Carrie, or Rebecca…
“I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. In the standard American horror canon, because a ghost violently attacks you or comes after you, at least you have the chance to fight back… but if they don’t attack you then the best you…
In Hong Kong’s tropical humidity, where sweltering bodies cram around mahjong tables or hunch over noodle stands, how can two people in a forbidden romance possibly cope? For Shanghainese émigrés and next-door neighbors Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung, in a role that won him Best…
Each one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films is a series of echoes and recurrences, palimpsests of what has preceded and teasing forebears of what’s to follow. There are certain indicators to his career’s chronology — sly mention of current events, the obvious quality of the…
George Romero’s two 1978 releases, Dawn of the Dead and Martin, represent the director at the apex of his career as an artist who had already grown beyond his revolutionary early work but still contained the hunger of a true independent. The two films…
Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who, in 1919, ten years before Cassavetes’ birth, described pretty well what would become something of a mantra…
During an interview with Jump Cut in 1976, director Monte Hellman described Two-Lane Blacktop as such: “It’s a film about inner life rather than outer life. But it’s not a film about other films; it’s not a pastiche.” The final caveat was in relation…
Premiering at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, before going on to win the prestigious Dragons & Tigers Award for emerging Asian cinema at that same year’s Vancouver Film Fest, Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide garnered near-universal praise from a who’s who of contemporary critics. Despite the…
How do you get away with the perfect murder? Easy: get someone else to do it for you. Such is the premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller Strangers on a Train, a taut, Dostoyevskyian exploration of moral ambiguity. Based on a novel by Patricia…
