Why is it that in the nation of Spain, a nation whose siestas evince a clear cultural supremacy over their efficiency-imprisoned neighbors, regularly invites very…
What’s so titillating about Hong Kong? Certain cities have sex appeal, of course — it’s easier to imagine a ménage à trois in Paris than…
The soldiers of Roberto Minervini’s The Damned play cards, wander around, and casually debate theology. The year is 1862, and these Union soldiers find themselves…
Masculinity has long been amorphous and tricky; it’s an endlessly fascinating and complex concept to all except those who need it and those who sell…
In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve…
In a less-than-apocryphal anecdote repeated throughout the French media, Jean Renoir once said, “I made La Bête humaine because [Jean] Gabin and I wanted to…
Though plenty of movies have been made either focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic in a literal way, and even more movies had been converted into…
Few works of art have a history as rousing or enigmatic as Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The tale goes something like this: Goya, possibly very…
Like many Japanese directors his age, Kichitaro Negishi got his start at the legendary Nikkatsu studio making the only thing the studio found to be…
Just barely after the advent of photography, the concept of putting a camera in a balloon was born. Taken long before commercial air travel, these…
The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which really…
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing…
Imagine being seated for a program of experimental films at a prestigious film festival. The room is packed with people who are willing to watch…
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one point…
How do you conjure a spectacle as a mere man? Real spectacle, the kind that rivals the infinite colorful vistas of the Northern Lights or…
Just as Megalopolis could be seen as a parable about Coppola’s own empire — Zoetrope, circa One from the Heart — Youth Without Youth is…
If every Coppola movie is also a documentary of its making, Gardens of Stone is the most haunted. One year before its release, Francis’s oldest…
One of the more amazing things about returning to Rosemary’s Baby after its release decades ago, or even watching it for the first time since…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of…
Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures…
Though comfortably placed in the more adventurous screening programs at film festivals, Eduardo Williams’ work has also managed to stand proudly independent of the dominant…