In his introduction to Olivier Assayas’ autobiographical essay/memoir A Post-May Adolescence: Letter to Alice Debord, Adrian Martin writes that “Assayas has always identified himself with…
Mercy and forgiveness can be profoundly absurd things, and Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara’s controversial and relentlessly gritty 1992 neo-noir thriller, grapples with that absurdity in…
It’s hard to fathom the pressure that would come with getting discovered by David Gilmour. The idea that a member of Pink Floyd would stick…
When Malcolm X, the epic biographical drama about the titular civil rights figure, hit theaters in November 1992, it came off the heels of a…
In one of Jafar Panahi’s most recent short films, Hidden, the director meets a young girl with a beautiful voice, but her very traditional parents…
As the one-dimensional cartoon Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) tells his new recruits, “You’re not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora,” James Cameron is writing…
In September 1970, multimedia artist Michael Snow took a helicopter 160 kilometers north of Sept-Îles (“Seven Islands”), Quebec with his wife and fellow filmmaker Joyce…
The liner notes for The Chicks’ third album, Home, included a photo of a marquee with giant block letters declaring, “We are changing the way…
I’m not sure people entirely remember the film Audition. Like much of his body of work, director Takashi Miike’s breakthrough into global recognition is perhaps…
The titles of Mikio Naruse’s films were once baroque mouthfuls (Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts, Wife Be Like a Rose!), but as his own filmmaking…
“The mise-en-scène flexes emotion like you flex your muscles.” So said Bertrand Tavernier of Jacques Becker’s Casque d’or, an observation applicable to the latter’s all…
Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack for Super Fly, Gordon Parks Jr.’s 1972 debut feature and one of the most popular and best known films of the blaxploitation…
Fifty years ago this month, the late Wes Craven premiered The Last House on the Left, a film notorious even in an era of exploitation…
The American cinema of the 1970s is a deep, deep well of intersecting delusion and pyrrhic victories, though hindsight has made it so that’s it…
For a brief period of time in the early-to-mid 2000s, there was perhaps no more exciting international director than Bela Tarr. Advocates like Jonathan Rosenbaum,…
There’s a wistful touch of George Bailey to the fatefully doomed protagonist of The Executioner (El Verdugo): José Luis is a Spanish undertaker yearning to…
By the time Chor Yuen’s Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan released in 1972, the image of wuxia in Hong Kong cinema had changed dramatically.…
Why does Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud continue to haunt? It follows from a distance and just when I think I’ve settled up — maybe three years…
During the summer of 1991, cousins Robert “Bobby” Diggs and Gary Grice were trying to get busy and do the impossible. They had both released…
Taking place entirely in the frigid confines of an Antarctic research lab, John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror masterpiece The Thing makes for exceptionally chilling post-pandemic…
On the occasion of Paul McCartney’s 80th birthday, I decided to burden myself with the unforgiving task of writing about the Beatles. After trying out…