The opening montage of I’m Still Here summons a cloud of fame engulfing actor Joaquin Phoenix — awards, accolades, the media appearances, the movies,…
When Zhang Yimou announced he was to remake the Coen Brothers’ 1984 seminal noir Blood Simple, one couldn’t help but wonder what he was…
No one’s going to argue that the Nazi propaganda machine, helmed by Joseph Goebbels, didn’t exploit the power of the filmed image. Case in…
In 1969, Jacques Mesrine (May-reen), French arch-criminal and would-be folk hero, was on the lam from both French and Canadian authorities. He fled to…
The stunning opening sequence of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone immediately communicates a specific relationship between region and mood. The flawless voice-over narration and…
Isolation is a universal theme, but it can also describe an intrinsically American experience of teenage angst. This contextual difference firmly separates Let the…
Troubled families rarely dissolve overnight. Instead, a slow erosive process corrodes pacts and compromises over weeks, months, and even years. Inevitably, each member becomes…
Self-seriousness can mortally wound the work of a pulp filmmaker who depends on his flashy style. In the case of British director Neil Marshall,…
Forget Monty Python — ten years ago, some friends and I stumbled across a British SNL-type television series called Jam, a mixed bag of…
Turkish director Fatih Akin’s movies are often musical in nature, fitting their rhythms to rhythm and their tones to tune. If Head-On, his first…
Although the story of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer began over 45 years ago, the short history of this documentary was launched in a Paris elevator,…
Female cinematic incarnations have long played second fiddle to subjective male visions of lust, intoxication, and regret, collectively narrow interpretations that often disavow a…
Late in Alex Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a damning but top-heavy indictment of clearly evil Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff,…
The debate over the 1989 children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies seems like a cultural millennium ago, but that doesn’t mean the era ushered…
Some fathers are born, some are made, and some were never meant to be. Jorge Machado, a Mayan fisherman, was evidently born to be…
Toward the end of Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, one of the film’s cast of circus performers botches a routine. As part of…
Only the resentful or the contrarian could undervalue Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother as an achievement both professional and cinematic. Written, produced, and…
Like a vengeful cornered beast, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising exhibits a desperate ferociousness during even its most lyrical moments. Set in 1000 AD…