Coming-of-age films are rarely as frank about the relationship between sex and politics as André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds. The film traces the lives of students…
Violent Cop as a title stands emblematic of the far simpler film that could have been. It’s a title straight out of the rural garage…
How does one definitively characterize a child’s point of view? Is it by positioning it as a response to the stultifying cynicism of adulthood, exemplified…
A man, a woman, their bodies wrapped once in golden ornament, and then again in Klimt’s golden cosmos. He cradles her head and reaches down…
Her mother’s letters come like intercepted radio transmissions, or echoes of prayers. In this state of relentless observation, pure receptivity, how could she not hear…
“Something that starts soon and looks good.” “Okay, so what’s the plot?” Anybody who has ever recommended any work of fiction has surely been hit…
It may seem counterintuitive to use Alfred Hitchcock’s famous quote — “Drama is life with all the boring bits cut out” — to describe a…
In his expansive body of work as a playwright, Harold Pinter dissected the language of power with a scalpel. Characters speak in clipped, ambiguous sentences,…
“We know not this thing as it is in itself, but only know its appearances.” – Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will…
Inland Empire is to Mulholland Drive how Twin Peaks: The Return is to the first two seasons of Twin Peaks — a film/TV series about…
Million Dollar Baby might open abruptly onto a brightly lit boxing ring, with two men contained in its boundaries and loudly grunting as they vigorously…
“24 of your favorite stars in Nashville!” hollers the voiceover in the opening credits of Robert Altman’s consensus favorite and magnum opus. (We can ignore…
Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) would be Otto Preminger’s last film for 20th Century Fox, capping off a productive (if tumultuous) chapter in the director’s…
When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called Anamorphoscope,…
The films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien are generally centered on the collision and convergence of multiple historical forces reshaping the “present” in their image, where a…
David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, five days before his 79th birthday, and as obituaries and remembrances poured forth, certain descriptors of his films…
Would Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg still be an effective movie if it wasn’t entirely sung-through? It seems like an impossible question to answer…
Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director…
“You’re an improbable person, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity. An inability to love or be loved.…
In the grips of the beating sun, we see a group of young radicals — ranging from Black Power activists to draft dodgers — attempting…