Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses…
In hindsight, Paul Schrader’s career has been a repeated jettisoning and reappropriation of extraneous artiness, new off-kilter filmic shapes of inscrutable quality emerging at an…
Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados, released, rather perfectly, at the midpoint of the century, is perhaps one of the most uninviting kickoffs to a director’s second…
For a director like Neil Jordan, whose long, seemingly middle-of-the-road filmography actually houses digressions from respectable adaptation into unrespectable pulp and soap, a Raymond Chandler…
Bill Forsyth may have to bear the reductive, buzzy distinction of having “put Scottish cinema on the map,” but he at least did so with…
From the first frame of Alcarràs, Carla Simón alerts the viewer to the integrality of the summery Catalonian landscape of her film. Within these windswept…
In 1968, Richard Fleischer democratized the participants of the crime procedural with The Boston Strangler, spearheading a new school of form as applied to the…
A Couple reflects a shift in Wiseman’s work, his fascination in institutional minutia pivoting to more transcendentalist territory, to moving effect. Performance — itself a…
Stars at Noon is the perfect externalization of a lovers-on-the-run experience, a fitting send-up to its source material. A gnarled, lightbulb-spotted, two-dimensional plastic facsimile of a…
Petrov’s Flu is an entirely maximalist formal exercise, one boasting a technical bravura that will impress as many as it puts off. A smoker’s cough that…
I Came By is all superficial signaling, failing to build any actual substance, subtlety, or genre thrills into weightless construction. Babak Anvari is less a…
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…
Patrick: So we’ve made it to the finale, Ryan. In our last correspondence I wrote of Assayas’ proclivity for compartmentalization, boxing different characters away once…
This latest iteration of The Most Dangerous Game is nothing more than a shallow vehicle for bloodshed, and dull to boot. 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game,…
Ryan: I originally intended to open this second part of our correspondence with a scene I thought was in this stretch from episodes five to…
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…
Patrick: Hi there Ryan. Happy to be corresponding with you once again! And on the deceptively dense new work from Olivier Assayas, a miniseries revamp…
Mathieu Amalric has inarguably built up a CV of highly visible appearances over the past two decades, so much so that he’s comparable to fellow…
We’s length is felt perhaps a bit too much, but it’s ultimately a visually rich and vigorous film that locates a warm humanity with the…
Clytaemnestra is compelling matched to its adapted text and its defining power dynamics, but is also a remarkably dry, frequently enervating work of stifled rhythms. What…