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…
The biography of an artist is an artist’s nemesis. It aims a howitzer at artists and the body of their work. In its illuminating, explicatory…
Traditionally, dramas dealing with characters moving on from relationships follow a three-part structure: the chronicling of the youthful highs of the first passionate relationship and…
It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their…
“I HATE YOU ALL.” So begins Gangsterism, Isiah Medina’s latest film. Lest one doubt his sincerity, the poster is tagged with a statement of intent:…
In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly…
“So it returns. Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” — James Joyce, Ulysses As the second…
Peter Fonda’s self-produced Idaho Transfer (1972) exists online as a decrepit VHS rip and a few equally shoddy digital re-uploads. I’ve heard tell of an…
By 1919, 24-year-old Richard Barthelmess was already a star. He’d just played the leading man, albeit in yellow-face, in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms opposite…
In the spring of 1974, The Night Porter was released in Italian cinemas. Directed by Liliana Cavani, the film stars a young Charlotte Rampling as…