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Bombast: The Immigrant and Godzilla
The Immigrant James Gray has always, but always, been out of step. His first movie, Little Odessa, debuted at the Venice Film Festival in late summer of 1994, but didn’t have a domestic release,...
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Cannes Diary #6
Bruno Dumont has made a comedy. As unlikely as that idea may seem to those who are familiar with his work, the leading French filmmaker is in Cannes with Li’l Quinquin (P’tit Quinquin), a four-episode...
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Fassbinder Diary #2: Pioneers and Merchants
Pioneers in Ingolstadt By the close of 1971, his third year as a filmmaker, Fassbinder had completed a dozen movies. He was so tireless, so determined to make all of life grist for his art, that...
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Cannes Diary #7
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep) The Cannes Film Festival acknowledged a new generation and the future of film, both on stage and off, as its jury of filmmakers and actors presented prizes tonight in...
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Film Comment News Digest: 5/26/14
Flashmob—that’s the title of the next Michael Haneke film, which will start shooting this summer. It’s a multi-character drama partly set in the U.S., and deals with what Heneke describes as “the...
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Fassbinder Diary #3: Beware a Holy Whore
If Truffaut’s Day for Night is about the joy of making movies and Godard’s Contempt is about the ordeal, Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (71) is about the ordeal of not making movies—the...
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Interview: Jim Mickle
Jim Mickle and Nick Damici have rat plague to thank for their thriving movie careers. Mickle, a writer-director, and Damici, a writer-actor, collaborated on three horror features before making the...
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Cannes Diary #8
American films were a rare breed in Cannes this year, but in competition there was one such selection with a uniquely American story. Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, a look at the strange life of strange...
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Rep Diary: The Ceremony
In the films of Nagisa Oshima, sexuality and mortality are always knotted up in a double-bind, and nowhere is this more apparent than in one of his most challenging works, The Ceremony. Oshima’s...
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Interview: Lukas Moodysson
Almost as habitually misapplied as “genius,” “Surreal,” or “hilarious,” punk—the music, the style, the attitude—has lost nearly all of its original menace and meaning. (The Metropolitan Museum of...
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Review: Gebo and the Shadow
A wayward son returns home, bringing doom with him. “I am he that causes suffering…and laughs,” João tells his struggling family upon returning after an eight-year absence. He is the specter of a...
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Cannes Special: The Wonders
Can a film covered in honey be bitter? To answer such a question we need to retrace the carbon footprints that nature and pre-industrial societies left on the machinery of cinema and the stories that...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Filipino Crime
As a proud Southerner (Go, South Carolina!), I feel fully qualified to say that the Philippines are basically the South of Asia. Like the South, they are full of guns, full of Jesus, and full of great...
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Film of the Week: Night Moves
Jesse Eisenberg recently appeared in a Dostoevsky adaptation of sorts: Richard Ayoade’s claustrophobic, Gilliam-esque take on The Double. Now it’s surely time for him to go the full mile and get...
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Fassbinder Adapts: Effi Briest
Effi Briest screens June 1 as part of “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In Effi Briest—both the 1974 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the 1895 Theodor Fontane...
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Bombast: Williamsburg on Screen
Last week I was writing about the particular quality that James Gray’s films have of etching very specific, transient qualities of tone onto the screen, something that requires a level of attention...
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Fassbinder Diary #4: From Death to Martha
Love is Colder Than Death Love Is Colder Than Death (69) kicked off Fassbinder’s unparalleled creative deluge, with the 24-year-old directing his own script, editing under a pseudonym (Franz Walsch),...
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Rep Diary: Len Lye: Motion Sketch
Despite the roots of experimental cinema in the European avant-gardes of the early 20th century, there hasn’t always been much attention paid to the work of filmmakers in other media. Much of this...
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Cannes Roundtable #2
Discussion participants: Charlotte Garson: film critic for France Culture, the cultural national public radio Joumane Chahine: former critic for daily An-Nahar in Lebanon, programmer for the Beirut...
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Review: Agnès Varda: From Here to There
“Art is unlimited. Art is a party. Art is a fair.” —Agnès Varda Early in the marvelously fluid, five-part cine-essay Agnès Varda: From Here to There, the eponymous veteran auteur briefly pauses to...
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