Whenever anyone mentions the 1998 Oscars, the conversation inevitably turns to the great “injustice” of Shakespeare in Love beating Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. But the…
The life-changing instance of reason defeating desire has been at the center of such great melodramatic moments as the airport climax of Casablancaand the railway station…
Some of Eric Rohmer’s sharpest skewerings of male psychology take as their focus guys defined by disjunctions between appearance and intention — take, for instance, the exceedingly suave…
One is tempted to think of Heat as a culmination, a kind of halfway point in the career of its director, Michael Mann. This isn’t entirely accurate, since the…
Edward Yang has often been lumped in with the “slow cinema” of his Taiwanese compatriot, Hou Hsiao-hsien. And it’s true that Yang’s 2000 film, Yi Yi, moves quite slowly, basking in wide…
It’s an acknowledged perceptual truth that we tend to ignore things about ourselves and the world around us that are uncomfortable to deal with. John…
John Carpenter one-upped Michael Winner’s fear-mongering, un-ironically fascist 1974 hit Death Wish with 1976’s Assault on Precinct. But if that film implied critique of a police force sowing its own doom…
Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary Portrait of Jason at first seems like a standard talking-heads documentary writ large, at least if one were to offer up a brief…
In Keisuke Kinoshita’s audaciously experimental The Ballad of Narayama, artifice becomes a vessel of truth, turning theatrical illusion into something boldly cinematic. Inspired by traditional Japanese Kabuki…
In retrospect, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us represents the calm before a contentious political decade between Iran and the U.S., one that dragged filmmakers…