Ensconced in the forest, enfolded by lush, verdant foliage, a spider’s web glints, caught in the halation of the sun; the glistening, intricate pattern is…
Lou Ye’s Summer Palace is an exasperating experience, full of interesting ideas and an incendiary political backdrop but falling victim to clichés of poeticized romantic longing.…
In 1987, Margaret Thatcher made her infamous assertion that “there is no such thing as society” in order to espouse her doctrine of methodological individualism.…
“You who go, you will return / You who sleep, you will rise / You who walk, you will be resurrected.” So begins The Night…
In Dario Argento’s Deep Red, the piercing visions of a Jewish-German telepath (Macha Méril) serve as an embodiment of this Italian master’s worldview: to look is to…
It seems natural to react with bewildered laughter when watching Scanners. The sight of actors contorting themselves with pained screams and Dick Smith’s visceral special effects…
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is one of the least-sexy films ever made about sex. Libidinous, yes, and full of naked bodies in salacious motion, engaging…
Jean Luc-Godard’s career came to an end in 1967, with Weekend — only for it to rise again out of the ashes, and for the filmmaker…
A Perfect World’s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but…
If A City of Sadness represents Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s greatest achievement to date — an assessment that its Venice Golden Lion and long-standing reputation would seem to…
In taking on the horrors of Vietnam, Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War may be said to mark a departure for the American director of…
Any talk of this film would be remiss without mention of its legendary tagline: “He came into town with his cock in his hand, and…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader review…
The decade of the Great Depression saw a slump in high-end Western productions. This indigenous genre had been immensely popular with audiences of the two…
Hong Sang-soo’s 2009 film Night and Day marks many firsts for the director, including his first film shot on digital and his first to be…
As perhaps the most narratively straightforward Hong Sang-soo film to date, albeit one still prone to a certain structural mischievousness, Woman on the Beach modulates its conceptual restraint in…
“I should correct something if it’s wrong,” says Soo-jung (Lee Eun-ju), the titular virgin of 2000’s Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, to her smothering…
Suicide Club opens with a montage of the city at night: documentary realist footage of pedestrians moving through Tokyo, on and off of trains and…
Though Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai’s second feature, in many ways it’s a film of firsts. It’s his first collaboration with Christopher Doyle (arguably the most…
There is a remarkable shot late in The Age of Innocence when the narrator (Joanne Woodward) describes a room in Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) New York City…
The Coen Brothers have a habit of using an innocuous object as a catalyst for many of their convoluted plots. This is slightly different from…