Who’s a Fredo? The Godfather Part II Against the New Right 1. In what amounts to the coda of The Godfather Part II, the final…
There are three kinds of transportation that dominate cinema: the horse, the car, and the train. Each of these has its romance and its landscape.…
The provocations of the Italian poet, critic, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini have been, for contemporary viewers, largely condensed into that one magnum opus of…
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, reacting…
When talking about the agonizingly slow death of his career, Orson Welles once claimed, “I began at the top and have been working my way…
If ever evidence was needed of art criticism’s role as a passing functionary in the workings of cultural amusement and consumption, one need look no…
Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia…
Few, if any, artists in the history of modern popular music experienced a creative eruption as rich as did Miles Davis did in the years…
Despite winning the Grand Prix at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore was controversial enough to be dismissed at…
It can be tempting to give up early on Radio City — right after album opener “O, My Soul,” the one song here that seems…
Any talk of this film would be remiss without mention of its legendary tagline: “He came into town with his cock in his hand, and…
Few things rankle a Southerner quite like the feeling that they’re being condescended to or underestimated by an outsider, and Good Old Boys toes a very fine…
The daughter of Minos and wife of Theseus has long fascinated many a romantic soul — Euripides, Racine, Swinburne, and Lee Hazlewood all wove the name of…
Future Iranian arthouse figurehead Abbas Kiarostami arrived in 1974 not only with his first feature-length film, but also a set of stylistic and thematic inclinations…