A maxim sometimes encountered in film writing — and one espoused in the transcript that follows — is the notion that a film teaches an…
Mark Jenkin had been making films for years before his debut feature, Bait, effectively took the UK by storm. Success across the festival circuit (a…
The Super-8 camera is light like a feather. In order to employ it well, the filmmaker should be light as a feather. To watch a…
In 1968, Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol. A vociferous feminist and author of the “S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, Solanas felt that Warhol…
In an introduction for Bill Morrison’s new film darker, Nitrate Picture Show festival director Peter Bagrov joked that when archivists and preservationists come across reels…
In the decades during Bush’s Global War on Terror that became Obama’s, then Trump’s, then Biden’s, there was a sense of resistance that permeated among…
Several of Kalil Haddad’s films begin with a school picture. An adolescent boy poses for the camera, his hair neatly brushed, his shirt clean, a…
Jaws: the New Hollywood movie that began to end them all by creating summer blockbusters, the origin point for practically every bad urban legend about…
Before you lies a choice, a selection of fates. In one possibility, you are Tsarina of all the Russias, you are caparisoned in gemstones, wrapped…
Allow me to posit a cinephilic contention: that cinema is perhaps the most formally complete of all art forms — or rather, a blistering confection…
It’s hardly surprising when a filmmaker rejects labels placed upon them by others. To put years of diligent, thoughtful work into a personal project and…
The first entry of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s BRD Trilogy and one of the last titles he made in the 1970s, the decade he’d defined with…
For Tim Geraghty and Sarah Halpern, the process of making Monument, a, well, monumental four-and-a-half-hour experimental documentary that’s ostensibly about the diminutive but shockingly consequential…
“His parents were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall struck its uniform beat, the wind whistled by the rattling windows; the…
Thanks in part to a shimmering new 4K restoration, Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s Speed Racer is enjoying a newfound moment in the spotlight. Originally released…
By way of disclaimer, some years back I collaborated with one of the lead organizers of Spectacle Theater’s STRUCTURE. WAVE. YOUTH. CINEMA. (SWYC) series (and…
Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is across from Jericho. And the Lord…
Patrick Wang has been operating on his own terms since his filmmaking career began in 2011 with In the Family. The nearly three-hour story of…
Not Arthur Rimbaud, but A. Rimbaud. The title of Patrick Wang’s latest film is the skeleton key that unlocks the principles behind its approach to…
It is not a steady wind that brings Nietzsche to the criticism of Magnificent Obsession, a film whose slavish self-sacrifice would doubtless atomize the long-dead…
Initially undistributed and reportedly rejected by film festivals such as Sundance and SXSW last year, prior to the acquisition courtesy of rookie distributor Obscured Releasing…