French auteur Jacques Rivette’s relationship to novelist Honoré de Balzac lasted throughout his entire life. His fascination first made its way into his directorial work…
In his introduction to Olivier Assayas’ autobiographical essay/memoir A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, Adrian Martin writes that “Assayas has always identified himself with…
Mercy and forgiveness can be profoundly absurd things, and Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara’s controversial and relentlessly gritty 1992 neo-noir thriller, grapples with that absurdity in…
When Malcolm X, the epic biographical drama about the titular civil rights figure, hit theaters in November 1992, it came off the heels of a…
In one of Jafar Panahi’s most recent short films, Hidden, the director meets a young girl with a beautiful voice, but her very traditional parents…
As the one-dimensional cartoon Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) tells his new recruits, “You’re not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora,” James Cameron is writing…
“Telling the truth can be dangerous business,” sing Lyle (Warren Beaty) and Hawk (Dustin Hoffman) in Ishtar (1987), words that seem especially true for Elaine…
In September 1970, multimedia artist Michael Snow took a helicopter 160 kilometers north of Sept-Îles (“Seven Islands”), Quebec with his wife and fellow filmmaker Joyce…
In spite of his standing as a widely respected pop surrealist, David Lynch’s relationship with critics and audiences has always been complicated, if not downright…
I’m not sure people entirely remember the film Audition. Like much of his body of work, director Takashi Miike’s breakthrough into global recognition is perhaps…
The titles of Mikio Naruse’s films were once baroque mouthfuls (Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts, Wife Be Like a Rose!), but as his own filmmaking…
“The mise-en-scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.” So said Bertrand Tavernier of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, an observation applicable to the latter’s all…
Fifty years ago this month, the late Wes Craven premiered The Last House on the Left, a film notorious even in an era of exploitation…
It’s the stuff of a million shoddy programmers from Hollywood’s golden age and twice as many cheap exploitation films from the heydays of the ’70s,…
The American cinema of the 1970s is a deep, deep well of intersecting delusion and pyrrhic victories, though hindsight has made it so that’s it…
For a brief period of time in the early-to-mid 2000s, there was perhaps no more exciting international director than Bela Tarr. Advocates like Jonathan Rosenbaum,…
There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to…
By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed dramatically.…
Why does Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud continue to haunt? It follows from a distance and just when I think I’ve settled up — maybe three years…
Taking place entirely in the frigid confines of an Antarctic research lab, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing makes for exceptionally chilling post-pandemic…