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Interview: Joanna Hogg
One of the most important new voices to have emerged in British cinema in the last decade, Joanna Hogg (who was born in 1960) has so far written and directed three films in which the Forsterian...
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Film of the Week: Snowpiercer
What does it take to make a film maudit? Bong Joon Ho’s futuristic train story Snowpiercer pulls into U.S. theatrical stations this week preceded by several months of speculation on the likelihood...
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Review: They Came Together
For every wayfarer who comes to New York with enough spring in his step to sprain a groin, expecting his life to play out like a romantic comedy, there are more than a few million longtime city...
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Interview: Bong Joon Ho
Bong Joon Ho’s action allegory Snowpiercer is a postapocalyptic variety show of icky violence, gleefully acted political caricatures, herky-jerky pacing, and offbeat sight gags. Or, as the villainous...
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Review: Transformers: Age of Extinction
Does producing an online “pre-make” of Transformers: Age of Extinction disqualify me from writing an impartial review, or does it qualify me more than most? A bit of both, perhaps. My making the video...
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Bombast: Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys “I’m hearing it sky-blue, you’re giving me brown.” This is producer Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle) in the recording booth, addressing a group of session musicians who will eventually be known as...
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Interview: Lou Ye
For sightless performers, it takes a special kind of trust to go before the camera, knowing that they won’t be able to see the results. Chinese director Lou Ye’s recent film, set in a massage center...
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Interview: Bernardo Bertolucci
Appearing on the scene as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s assistant on Accattone (61), director Bernardo Bertolucci has been everything from wunderkind (The Grim Reaper, 62) to perverted genius (Last Tango in...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Slow Japan
A guy walks through the snow. He keeps walking. One foot after another. He’s still walking. There he goes, heading up the mountain. Tromp, tromp, tromp. Walking through the snow. You go get a drink....
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Festivals: Seattle
Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Seattle International Film Festival has maintained a welcoming low profile despite its size (at 25 days it is the longest and largest film festival in the...
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Film of the Week: A Hard Day’s Night
When Richard Lester asked John Lennon, then relatively new to fame, how he had liked Stockholm, Lennon replied: “It was a plane, a room, a car, and a cheese sandwich.” In A Hard Day’s Night, the...
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Bombast: Poliziotteschi and Screening History
There is a long-standing tendency on the part of the critical caste, when providing historical context, to assume the voice of a firsthand witness. This allows you to fall back on the accepted version...
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Festivals: Maryland & Little Rock
On a gorgeous Friday night in May, on a former railway bridge lit up in neon that overlooks the Arkansas River, the cultural cognoscenti of Little Rock scarfed hot dogs alongside a New York gang...
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Kaiju Shakedown: So Much Sex!
Hong Kong is a very culturally conservative city, so why was the top-grossing movie of this past Chinese New Year Golden Chickensss, the latest installment in comedienne Sandra Ng’s franchise about a...
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Film of the Week: Closed Curtain
A reassuring article of faith has it that political repression tends to have a salutary effect on art. The classic evidence often cited is the imaginative energy of writers in Stalinist Russia—one of...
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Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The style and vigor of Matt Reeves’s CGI spectacular is demonstrated at approximately the 60-minute mark when an Uzi-carrying ape, his face contorted in a battle cry recalling Braveheart-era Mel...
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Film Comment News Digest: 7/14/14
All the news that’s fit to be lifted from other sites and semi-rewritten: While you’re busy waiting to see Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, the director is about to embark on his first American...
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Interview: Fellipe Barbosa
As one of my professors in college was fond of saying, postmodernism isn’t really that modern: the Caribbean began experiencing it in 1492 in the form of syncretism (or, as a more user-friendly...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Eternal Zero
At the end of 2013, Hayao Miyazaki’s purportedly final film, The Wind Rises, soared onto cinema screens, an elegiac, dreamy ode to creativity that was also a fictionalized biography of Jiro Horikoshi,...
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Festivals: Il Cinema Ritrovato
Monument Film During a panel on the evolving dynamic between digital and chemical processes in film restoration and distribution at this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, Grover Crisp of Sony Pictures noted...
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