After A New Love in Tokyo, Banmei Takahashi turned beyond the mortal realm. Japan was fine. His films — whether through home video as V-Cinema or…
Italian-American documentarian Gianfranco Rosi has been making films for 30 years, but they’ve never quite been entirely about what is shown on the screen. His…
I’d promised myself to buy one book by a French author when perusing the tourist-heavy English language-friendly bookstores in Paris, and, while of course I…
Content warning: this piece mentions Imperial Japan’s sexual violence. In Yasuzo Masumura’s Black Test Car (1962), the director revisits ideas from his earlier Giants and…
In those chilly days of the Romantic poet, Samuel Coleridge sought to distinguish two synonyms. What is imagination, and what is fancy? He had this…
After a long career as an actress, Marijana Janković stepped behind the camera to tell the story on her own terms. Her debut feature Home,…
There’s a school of thought that would read Pillion’s ending as a positive sentiment, in which a man who blunders his way into the BDSM…
Three Austrian documentaries from the past two years turn their gaze to the racially marginalized of the small mountain country. The oldest of the three,…
Nowadays remembered as the independent producer of the heavy-hitters of the Japanese New Wave — Nagisa Ōshima; Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida; Shuji Terayama; all of…
My introduction to Bob Clark came through his latter holiday comedy, A Christmas Story, a film I grew up with and still associate with seasonal…
Filmmakers as confident and as distinctive as Bi Gan are rarely as young as he. At just 36 years of age, he’s directed four short…
One of the quirks of Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) in James L. Brooks’ 2010 film How Do You Know is a tendency to speak in…
When you’re tucked into a cozy nook and crack open a whodunit, you know what to expect. The dead body in a locked room. The…
The Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum’s joint Jean Epstein retrospective makes a simple case: with Epstein, the sea edits. It splices, stretches, and scours…
Over the weekend of November 14-16, I viewed the entirety of Twin Peaks: The Return, screened thanks to the great efforts of the Philadelphia Film…
When you love a director, you have to trust them, there’s no other way. That’s not the message of Casino — a quasi-biblical text about…
Winter: the sun shyly hides behind a curtain of gray and makes its exit much earlier, but, when it does appear, it shines a special…
During my short self-directed crash course on Argentine cinema last month, I was surprised how little had been written in English on the subject. There…
This evening, like every evening, you settle in to listen to a song from Cole Porter’s songbook. There is nothing like the sharp lash of…
First, on griots: these were the African Mande people’s historians, genealogists, poets, and court jesters. They were the official storytellers, and, as writers of their…
It’s mid-September, a broadcast TV network is on the brink of a merger, and an evening news segment could blow up these lucrative plans and…