In 1963, John Wayne was just as much the face of the Western genre as he had been since 1939. The Duke’s charisma, one-size-fits-all philosophy…
Arguably the most significant acquitting factor and favored defense for his predominantly libertarian cinema, Clint Eastwood’s tendency toward unashamed self-critique and persona deconstruction has dictated…
Clint Eastwood likes inky color patterns, tar-black shadow cutting across battleship grey sterility, and drab, olive-green dress. The actor-director has performed a gradual shift towards…
The white-hot winning streak that Clint Eastwood was on during the mid-’90s constitutes a seldom touched — at least by his own contemporary standards —…
Jonathan Rosenbaum is fond of quoting British critic and curator Michael Witt on Godard; Witt writes that “If Godard… has repeatedly suggested that the cinema…
Clint Eastwood is perhaps as iconic a figure as there is in the last half-century of Hollywood cinema. Gunslinger machismo, a hard-nosed boomer ethos, and,…
It’s a common misconception of auteurism that once a filmmaker has been so designated, every film by that particular artist suddenly becomes an unimpeachable masterpiece.…
Call him what you want: a legend, heir to true Hollywood classicism, an egocentric industry black sheep, a man of his own mark who frequently…
Tsai’s latest, like the director’s best works, revels in the unexpected, sublime textures of daily routine and understated tenderness. Those familiar with Tawainese auteur Tsai Ming-liang will…
In the cinema of the filmmaker Christian Petzold, it’s not hard to notice a motif of water that stands out across his work and often…
Beginning in 2015, following the (by all accounts exhausting) production of Phoenix, Christian Petzold returned to television, where he began his career in the 1990s…
2018’s Transit followed two period pieces, each set in a specific era highly important to director Christian Petzold: Barbara, which unfolds in East Germany in…
Any discussion of Phoenix almost begs to begin with the ending. One of the greatest mic-drop endings in all but the most literal sense, it…
In retrospect, it almost seems odd that Christian Petzold’s international breakthrough effectively came with Barbara. Though it was his first period film, dealing with a…
Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as…
Jerichow isn’t really an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, at least not any more than Transit is an adaptation of Casablanca or Undine…
The liminal sensibilities of Christian Petzold’s films accord their material spaces an air of contradiction: the gleaming surfaces of steel walls and glass doors exude…
Over the course of his decades-long career, Christian Petzold has come to shape something like a cinema of failure; potently and precisely carving itself from…
Christian Petzold is a serious, even formidable cinephile, but that shouldn’t be confused for humorlessness. His referentiality is streamlined and polite, endearingly obvious, but only…
Following his breakthrough film, The State I Am In, Christian Petzold returned to smaller-scale television production for his next project, 2001’s Something to Remind Me.…