Since stepping down as In Review Online’s Editor-in…
How do you conjure a spectacle as a mere man? Real spectacle, the kind that rivals the infinite colorful vistas of the Northern Lights or the deep terror of a thunderstorm, is the product of God, nature, and Hollywood. Meanwhile, independent movies are the realm of either cheaper thrills or serious lectures or the modernist
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While his first directorial credit for a commercial project was released a decade after the Movie Brats first took hold of Hollywood in the late '60s to early '70s — where a mere year after 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, he would collaborate with Steven Spielberg on 1941 — Robert Zemeckis is, in heart
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Call him what you want: a legend, heir to true Hollywood classicism, an egocentric industry black sheep, a man of his own mark who frequently courts controversy in service of his own politics. Sure, fair; but one thing is irrefutable: few cineastes (and certainly no other actor-turned-director) have ever so consistently shaped the cinematic fable,
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"Harun [Farocki] told me that for people of his generation, the left-wing students, [Night and Fog] was the movie that showed them what had happened in the concentration camps, and so it was the movie that divided them from their parents. They understood that the German state, even the modern German state, was based on
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In 1954, a 19-year-old girl named Sylvette David sauntered past Pablo Picasso’s window. The aging artist was instantly beguiled. A few weeks later, he revealed a portrait of David, the first of 60 that he would paint that spring. She became his inspiration, his Girl with the Ponytail, his muse. The muse is one of
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After a first encounter, Chinese filmmaker Lou Ye seemed ripe for being written off as a Wong Kar-wai copycat — at best an adept craftsman of soft-focus, woozily shot images of beautiful men and women, bathed in shadow, moving kinetically through rain-streaked city streets. The film that suggested this was 2003’s Purple Butterfly, a quixotic,
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When Hong Sang-soo made his debut feature, 1996’s The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well, the South Korean cinema had not yet developed into…
Sion Sono, known to most as a director of brutally violent films like 2002’s Suicide Club, can claim at least three titles in his filmography that contain the word…
Originally published August 15th, 2011 One of the most important filmmakers of the last 30 years emerged from a country famous for its brutal censorship,…