Each installment of the Dreileben trilogy — directed by Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf, and Christoph Hochhäusler, respectively — tells what the filmmakers have described as a “horizontal” story. Taken together, of course, the matter is quite different, and the resulting triptych has been described…
Love and Bruises, which Lou Ye made during his five-year, government-imposed ban from filmmaking in China, is a tale of l’amour fou set, appropriately enough, in Paris. However, the grand romanticism that usually marks such stories is replaced here by a grimly repetitive pattern…
For Hong Sang-soo, whose working method and steady output has been, and continues to be, (relatively) unburdened by production constraints, the notion of artistic freedom has never been much in question. And so it is with 2011’s List, a half-hour short film about a…
Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an epic, four-hour romantic comedy about terrible fathers, upskirt photography, Catholicism, and the meaning of love. Where Sono’s Bicycle Sighs could be categorized as a fairly typical minimalist art film, and his Suicide Club firmly entrenched itself in the millennial wave of Japanese horror, Love…
One task of the critic is to place a film within the context of its artist’s entire body of work, looking for recurring themes, motifs, obsessions, etc. But the sheer breadth of Sion Sono’s filmography—coupled with those films’ sporadic (at best) distribution—leaves the average viewer…
#12: One Whole Year of Bad Ideas: A.K.A. The Happy Madison Productions Episode Download episode here. Episode Description: This month, for their twelfth (TWELFTH!!!) Bad Idea Podcast, Simon & Steve forgo their usual obscurities for a series of films people might have actually heard of. Oddly enough,…
To engage with something critically is to assume, despite any post-structural handwringing, that the works with which we’re engaged contain some essential truth. That’s the conceit of all criticism: beyond projections of the reader, the personal prisms through which X looks like Y and vice versa, we’re required…
It’s probably (no, definitely) pushing it to suggest that Transformers: Dark of the Moon has anything in common with Terrence Malick’s also-currently-in-theaters The Tree of Life, but that won’t stop me from claiming that the former is sort of the Mirror Universe twin of the…
#3: Nothing So Appalling in the Annals of Horror: The First American Goremeister Download episode here. Episode Description: This week, Bad Idea Podcast tackles—and without shoulder pads—Herschell Gordon Lewis’s filmography. In time for Anthology Film Archives’ recent mini-retro of Lewis’s films, we look back at the first acknowledged…
