There is no defined rubric to be a Bruno Dumont player: the director has spent his career weathering comparisons to Bresson and his predilection…
Clint Eastwood likes inky color patterns, tar-black shadow cutting across battleship grey sterility, and drab, olive-green dress. The actor-director has performed a gradual shift…
Saul Bass’ poster for Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962) shows the dome of the Capitol neatly dissected from the building itself, the title…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
“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…
#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…
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…
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…
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.…