When Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep came out in 1996, the brash, freewheeling experimentalism of the French New Wave was already long in the rearview. Luc Besson was pumping out reliably stylized action-thrillers like La Femme Nikita and Léon. Saccharine crowd-pleasers like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie…
Released in 1997, Tsai Ming-liang’s The River extended what would become a de facto family trilogy in which the same actors reprise identical roles within a particular domestic structure, with Rebels of the Neon God as the first entry and What Time Is It…
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 DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review…
Kent Jones once wrote that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s 1999 film Rosetta had “a fearsome unity, an unshakable commitment to rendering the contours of a destitute life and the ever present possibility of spiritual transformation.” Indeed, this is an apt description of not just…
I Am Keiko is a film caught within the dimensions of its maker’s head, composed of and consumed by the limits of that brain’s capacity for thought. This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment, and a twofold statement at that. Sion…
#11: Michael Winner: Feminist!? Download episode here. Episode Description: This month, we selected a handful of cuts from hack director Michael Winner’s body of work. Don’t let the fact that Winner is primarily known as the director of Death Wish fool you: This guy’s a real feminist.…
#10: The Bad Idea Podcast Holiday Special: A Very Belated Renny Harlin Christmas Download episode here. Episode Description: This time on Bad Idea Podcast, Simon & Steve tackle Finnish enigma Renny Harlin. The idea: figure out what makes him tick—why some of his films are exemplary, incomparably…
