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…
More comparable to Walerian Borowczyk than any other well-known Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Zulawski never really gained more than a dedicated cult following during his career. Even Possession, a disturbing classic of the horror genre, remains underappreciated by mainstream audiences. The film is set in…
At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise. It’s remarkable that a Brit previously known for atmospheric slow-burns like Alien and Blade Runner helmed…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From the outset, wonky angles capture images in slight distortion; primary characters exhaust nearly half of the film’s runtime before any…
With the 2020 Cannes Film Festival shuttered in the wake of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the spring festival’s storied history is once again on the minds of cinephiles across the globe. A festival well over 70 years old, it’s become the most prestigious…
**What follows is the inaugural KtC entry for the recently added 1950s canon. Make sure to check out all of the 1950s inclusions (and the rest of the canon in its current entirety). Minnelli’s melodramas, always receding behind his much more popular musicals and…
