You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that the recent Maggie Gyllenhaal vehicle The Kindergarten Teacher was a remake of a 2015 Israeli movie.…
With the clarity of hindsight to our advantage, it’s easy to claim Sion Sono’s 8mm debut feature film to be a work of mad…
Nagisa Ôshima’s audacity as a filmmaker was unmistakable by the time his third feature hit screens in 1960. The full scope of the filmmaker’s…
In retrospect, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us represents the calm before a contentious political decade between Iran and the U.S., one that dragged…
In a season where all films are trying too hard to either be award winners or box office cash cows — or both —…
With Vengeance, Johnnie To once again makes art of action. In a stylish Hong Kong thriller held captive by the stoic auspices of French…
The opening montage of I’m Still Here summons a cloud of fame engulfing actor Joaquin Phoenix — awards, accolades, the media appearances, the movies,…
When Zhang Yimou announced he was to remake the Coen Brothers’ 1984 seminal noir Blood Simple, one couldn’t help but wonder what he was…
No one’s going to argue that the Nazi propaganda machine, helmed by Joseph Goebbels, didn’t exploit the power of the filmed image. Case in…
“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Those words have never rung so true as they do in conjunction with Alexandre Aja’s headfirst dive…
Forget Monty Python — ten years ago, some friends and I stumbled across a British SNL-type television series called Jam, a mixed bag of…
Although the story of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer began over 45 years ago, the short history of this documentary was launched in a Paris elevator,…
The debate over the 1989 children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies seems like a cultural millennium ago, but that doesn’t mean the era ushered…
Redundant conversations about celebrity culture and nauseating puns about table seasonings are inevitably attached to an Angelina Jolie film entitled Salt. A mix of…
The Runaways’ place in rock history is slight at best. They occupy a buried patch between feminal compatriots Patti Smith and the Go-Go’s and…
For those who’ve spent hours on YouTube viewing parkour clips, there’s nothing more exhilarating than watching l’art du déplacement, the art of moving. Parkour,…
Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air feels like a sales pitch, and thanks to the film’s manipulative powers, we actually start to believe that…
To term something a “festival film” can be patronizing — it pigeonholes a movie as one with very limited audience appeal. These are usually…