The specter of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) looms large over Chantal Akerman’s The Captive (2000). At times, it’s to such an extent that it…
The title of Maurice Pialat’s 1974 film La Gueule Ouverte is reminiscent of something Francis Bacon said about his paintings of the pope screaming,…
For better or for worse, everybody desires for a second go at their greatest failures. Life is cruel and fleeting, and there is perhaps…
When the band Slowdive came out of a 22-year hiatus with a self-titled album, the silhouetted graphic of a face that made up the…
In keeping with his reputation for being a filmmaker whose work is as celebrated as it is reviled, Danish wunderkind and perennial enfant terrible…
“That woman deserves her revenge and we deserve to die.” Twenty years and six months ago, Quentin Tarantino left audiences wanting blood. Well, even…
In an interview with Michael Haneke about 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the final part of the director’s then lesser-known Glaciation Trilogy (1989 -…
The inimitable internal torments of David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers are colored in bloody red and sterile chrome, starting with the melancholy anatomical figures and…
Toward the end of Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition trilogy (1959-61), his unsparingly brutal anti-war epic about the Japanese military’s unsparingly brutal treatment of…
As Mel Gibson’s star was rising in the 1980s, he was becoming increasingly self-destructive. By the peak of his fame in the ’90s, he…
In the AI-drenched bizarro world that is 2024, the premise of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released 20 years ago this…
Stan Brakhage’s 1958 film Anticipation of the Night could perhaps be likened to the late-19th and early-20th century tonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg. In…
There comes a time when you just can’t swallow the bitter pill of reality; you have to crush it up, mix it in with…
I have clear memories of watching Jane Campion’s Bright Star (2009) as a pre-teen. The spring and summertime passages of the film are most…
As the 1950s progressed, Nicholas Ray found himself in an increasingly precarious, even fraught relationship with filmmaking. He directed 14 films in 10 years,…
Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2001 romantic drama, premiered at that year’s Cannes Film Festival where it received a rather muted response, even from admirers…
The great director Paul W.S. Anderson expressed irritation in his commentary track on Alien vs. Predator (2004) to the common descriptor used to label…
When High and Low was released in 1963, Akira Kurosawa had been working his way through some of the world’s great literary works for…