The key word in the title of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is “sorrows,” translated from the German Leiden, which really…
The title gives it away. Before one even begins watching Paul Schrader’s latest, the tone is effectively set by a little writerly in-joke of changing…
Imagine being seated for a program of experimental films at a prestigious film festival. The room is packed with people who are willing to watch…
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie are very serious about film. Film itself, that is, and particularly the consumer-ready format of Super-8 that at one point…
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…
Just as Megalopolis could be seen as a parable about Coppola’s own empire — Zoetrope, circa One from the Heart — Youth Without Youth is…
If every Coppola movie is also a documentary of its making, Gardens of Stone is the most haunted. One year before its release, Francis’s oldest…
One of the more amazing things about returning to Rosemary’s Baby after its release decades ago, or even watching it for the first time since…
Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of…
Medium-length features; a small but consistent troupe of actors in every picture; every scene just another conversation; little-to-no camera movement; and beguiling, inventive narrative structures…
Though comfortably placed in the more adventurous screening programs at film festivals, Eduardo Williams’ work has also managed to stand proudly independent of the dominant…
Since 2011, animator and director Don Hertzfeldt has focused on one topic: memory. In the tripartite It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the loss of memory…
France had the Comte de Lautréamont, a young writer who embodied the Romantic spirit even more than the Romantics, and thrust an entire generation’s literary…
An easy bit of advice to give to any filmmaker who tries, whether with journalistic integrity or well-meaning folksy soapboxery, to make a film about…
For most of Frederick Wiseman’s career, the master documentarian has focused on the lives and institutions of the United States. His films have painted a…
Who owns America? The most cynical answer is likely the correct one: the highest bidders, the ones most willing to relinquish from themselves the Christian…
James Benning, the legendary moving-picture artist known for his durational portraits of America, has made one of his most personal works yet. Shot not too…
At first glance, the Gstaad Palace looks like the last vestige of European aristocracy. The town of Gstaad, Switzerland itself catered only to the ultra-wealthy…
Though the blues and jazz and bluegrass and country and frankly the whole catalogue of American music comes from the American South, the region’s role…
Gone are the days of Mortal Kombat, Double Dragon, BloodRayne, Max Payne, and even Warcraft. Video game adaptations used to promise a Faustian bargain where…