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…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the…
“He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.” — Ecclesiastes 10:8 They called him Von, the man in whom lived so many. Von Schnieditz, von…