In William S. Burroughs’ novella Queer, Lee takes Allerton, the object of his all-consuming desire, to see Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. “In the dark theater,” Burroughs writes,…
Some movies are so bad that you stop watching them. Life is too short to endure consumerist rubbish that affronts art. Other movies are so…
In 1973’s The Day of The Jackal, adapted from the novel by Frederick Forsyth, an English assassin is hired by the Far Right OAS in…
The last image of Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, Scénarios, is one of the most heartbreaking in his long, storied, notorious, glorious, defining, essential career. It is of…
In his film adaptation of August Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, director Malcom Washington approaches his source material with both reverence and flexibility, providing space…
Grindhouse aficionados likely need no introduction to J. Michael Muro and Roy Frumkes’ 1987 splatter-fest Street Trash, a grungy cult-favorite about tainted liquor melting the…
Whenever a film critic, especially one who has probably only played a very limited number of games in their life, argues that a film is…
There’s a feeling most people will recognize, like leafing through a photo album you’ve seen a hundred times — the faces are familiar, the stories…
Way back in 2000, coming off a critical and box office slump that consumed most of the ’90s, Ridley Scott struck back with Gladiator. (It’s…
There’s a moment near the end of the first act of The Black Sea when Khalid (Derrick B. Harden), a Brooklynite stranded in the port…
Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost Cat…
One thing left uncertain: just who are Dorothy Gale’s parents? I don’t quite mean that literally, though the overgrown Oz extended universe probably has an…
In 1520, Stockholm witnessed one of the most brutal power struggles in Scandinavian history. Following a tense standoff between Sweden and Denmark, Danish King Christian…
Engaged in a lengthy process of simultaneous expansion and refinement, the indefatigable Hong Sang-soo seems to practice a new, yet knowingly familiar, alchemy with each…
As connoisseurs of DTV action cinema well know, even the most promising film is likely to wind up being about 15 minutes of good stuff…
There is no perfect formula for a first scene — art is simply too complex to make such generalizations. The pulsing action of Jackie Chan’s…
Between 2001 and 2006, researchers at Boston College collected recordings from former paramilitary members of the Irish Republican Army in Belfast as part of an…
It’s a bold strategy, especially today, to go courting favor for a reactionary, conspiracy-minded, sexually repressed young man. Set aside the recent Presidential election results,…
Soundtrack to a Coup d’État is as ambitious an archival documentary as its name would suggest, examining the ways in which American bebop and swing…
Humphrey Bogart was one of the most prolific and widely admired actors of the Hollywood studio system, and though he is still known for the…
After a prologue of ghostly nightmares followed by a nerve-racking dinner with friends, Anne (Synnove Karlsen), who is on a break with her abusive partner…