In the 25 years since Robert Zemeckis released Contact, the search for extraterrestrials has moved from fringe conspiracy theory to a matter of national security.…
“The problem with Forrest Gump is it made a billion dollars. If we’d just made a successful movie, Bob and I would have been geniuses.…
No matter how many times I see it, Death Becomes Her exists first and foremost as a VHS box sitting on the cramped shelf of…
Even though, to many audiences today, the eclecticism of live-action and animation may appear as a sort of a postmodernist achievement in the realm of…
Cinephilia is necessarily littered with the detritus of half-remembered viewing experiences, films only glimpsed from childhood in a perspective almost wholly incompatible with the viewer’s…
Nowadays we’re saddled with tepid action comedy stuff like The Lost City or Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s alleged chemistry in the Jurassics World.…
Though the vast majority of Robert Zemeckis’ films are family-friendly, it’s also easy to find cruelty and blatant sexuality in nearly all of them, the…
For a film whose subject is one of the most famous events in the history of American popular culture, Robert Zemeckis’ I Wanna Hold Your…
While his first directorial credit for a commercial project was released a decade after the Movie Brats first took hold of Hollywood in the late '60s to early '70s — where a mere year after 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, he would collaborate with Steven Spielberg on 1941 — Robert Zemeckis is, in heart
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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 courts controversy in service of his own politics. Sure, fair; but one thing is irrefutable: few cineastes (and certainly no other actor-turned-director) have ever so consistently shaped the cinematic fable,
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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…