With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones’s torch-carrying efforts on behalf of the tried-and-tested beauty of the American West continue to be moving. Taking into account his feature appearance as a practical spokesperson for old western values in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old…
Part of the fun — and the discomfort — of watching Nightcrawler is in gradually adapting to the rules of its nocturnal world, a sprawling network of photojournalism castaways following police reports to grisly crime scenes to shoot them and package the footage for network news stations. Because…
Though it touches upon the comedy of remarriage film, the family vacation film, the bourgeois critique film, and the male-id exposé film, Force Majeure is nonetheless first and foremost something like a science-fiction object, the kind of thing that some heretofore-undetermined future intelligent species…
For an actor, part of the art of embodying a morally questionable character is to first seek a point of empathy rather than glaring signs of weakness — to make a bid to understand character flaws rather than hastily inflate them. This is what separates nuanced…
The handheld, behind-the-head following shot loosely trailing a character in movement is often a staple of nonjudgmental, naturalistic filmmaking, coming as it does with a built-in implication of directorial humility. It’s an approach that relinquishes autonomy to the body being photographed rather than the…
Kevin Jerome Everson’s The Island of St. Matthews plays like something that might be unearthed in the furthest reaches of a “community films” search criteria, on some creative commons internet archive. With its unadorned 16mm footage and lack of contemporary signifiers, it’s strange to…
It’s an acknowledged perceptual truth that we tend to ignore things about ourselves and the world around us that are uncomfortable to deal with. John Carpenter’s They Live takes this idea to a logical extreme: In denial of the all-consuming conformity of their culture, the characters…
As with the latest films by Manoel de Oliveira and — prior to his recent passing — Raul Ruiz, it’s tempting to digest a new film by the 91-year-old French director Alain Resnais as an all-encompassing swan song, a final testament on the filmmaker’s accumulated thoughts on cinema…