Filmmakers as confident and as distinctive as Bi Gan are rarely as young as he. At just 36 years of age, he’s directed four short…
One of the quirks of Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) in James L. Brooks’ 2010 film How Do You Know is a tendency to speak in…
When you’re tucked into a cozy nook and crack open a whodunit, you know what to expect. The dead body in a locked room. The…
The Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum’s joint Jean Epstein retrospective makes a simple case: with Epstein, the sea edits. It splices, stretches, and scours…
Over the weekend of November 14-16, I viewed the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return, screened thanks to the great efforts of the Philadelphia Film…
When you love a director, you have to trust them, there’s no other way. That’s not the message of Casino — a quasi-biblical text about…
Of all the classics directed by Yasujirō Ozu, 1949’s Late Spring is not only the one that kickstarted his most fruitful creative period that would…
This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of…
It’s mid-September, a broadcast TV network is on the brink of a merger, and an evening news segment could blow up these lucrative plans and…
The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory…
Traditionally, dramas dealing with characters moving on from relationships follow a three-part structure: the chronicling of the youthful highs of the first passionate relationship and…
“I HATE YOU ALL.” So begins Gangsterism, Isiah Medina’s latest film. Lest one doubt his sincerity, the poster is tagged with a statement of intent:…
“So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” — James Joyce, Ulysses As the second…
Peter Fonda’s self-produced Idaho Transfer (1972) exists online as a decrepit VHS rip and a few equally shoddy digital re-uploads. I’ve heard tell of an…
In the spring of 1974, The Night Porter was released in Italian cinemas. Directed by Liliana Cavani, the film stars a young Charlotte Rampling as…
“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8 They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von…
Come a little closer and see — you need to inhale. No contemporary filmmaker understands California quite like Paul Thomas Anderson, who throughout his rightfully…
Socrates: The main question I want to ask is whether a lifetime spent scratching, itching and scratching, no end of scratching, is also a life…
It’s girthy, oversized, gold-encrusted, evocative of pain more than pleasure. No, I’m not talking about the massive enameled penis that makes a couple appearances throughout…
“This language of the unreal, this fictive language which delivers us to fiction, comes from silence and returns to silence.” – Maurice Blanchot, The Space…