When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc…
Imagine my surprise when a cursory online search revealed that virtually no critic of note has written a modern reassessment of the 1986 serial-killer-road-movie cum…
“You say you’re under a curse – well so what? So’s the whole damn world.” In a darkened cave, miles away from Ashitaka’s home, a…
To the casual observer, viewing someone else’s relationship from the outside, there often appears to be a sense of unity, cohesion of the somatic and…
It took legendary Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty 19 years after his barnstorming 1973 debut film, Touki Bouki, to deliver his sophomore film. Hyenas, released…
After three title cards – “DOG STAR MAN,” “BY BRAKHAGE,” “PRELUDE” – written in an esoteric font, we spend nearly a full minute with a…
Observed through a crystalline lens of deadpan gentility, Whit Stillman’s charming 1990 comedy of manners, Metropolitan, is a timeless tale of a bygone era. Stillman…
Despite winning the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore was controversial enough to be dismissed at…
Pedro Costa has long been celebrated for his loose Fontainhas trilogy, a series of docu-fiction hybrids made in collaboration with residents of the former Lisbon…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of…
More comparable to Walerian Borowczyk than any other well-known Polish filmmaker, Andrzej Zulawski never really gained more than a dedicated cult following during his career.…
At the crossroads of about a half-dozen genres and borrowing the best that each has to offer, there’s no other movie quite like Ridley Scott’s…
In many ways, Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive L’amour follows (or establishes, given its chronological situation within his filmography) many of the director’s most characteristic tendencies. From the…
With the 2020 Cannes Film Festival shuttered in the wake of the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, the spring festival’s storied history is once again on…
**What follows is the inaugural KtC entry for the recently added 1950s canon. Make sure to check out all of the 1950s inclusions (and the…
For virtually his entire career, Abel Ferrara has seemed to occupy a liminal space in film criticism, not unlike the spaces his characters seem to…
Classifying Blue strictly as a piece of cinema seems like a rather odd distinction, considering Derek Jarman breaks the cardinal sin of the medium by…
Haunting, melancholy, and achingly cool, Louis Malle’s 1958 debut Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour L’échafaud) laid the cinematic foundations for motifs and aesthetics that…
A languid watercraft cruising the currents of the Hudson River. “Captain! Something off the port bow!” A rotten human arm floating in the distance. It…
Alain Resnais’s ingenuity as a filmmaker is on full display in his adaptation of one of the British theater’s most complex and rewarding works, Intimate…