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,…
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…
Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive descriptor…
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 its…
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 some…
After three title cards – “DOG STAR MAN,” “BY BRAKHAGE,” “PRELUDE” – written in an esoteric font, we spend nearly a full minute with a…
In 1964, the Brazilian Armed Forces — with support from the United States government — took up measures to overthrow democratically elected leaders of Brazil,…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some…
All Summer Long signals the beginning of the end of an era for the Beach Boys: the soon-to-be pioneers hadn’t yet ditched their upbeat, California surf-rock,…
If The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan proved that Bob Dylan could do anything and everything, The Times They Are a-Changin’ proved that he could hone in on doing one thing very well.…