Clik here to view.
Critical Dialogue: Boyhood
Somewhere in the dialogical midst of the documentary Double Play, James Benning says to Richard Linklater: “I’m not interested in them making another good film . . . I’m more interested in my students...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Film of the Week: Mood Indigo
Since the advent of CGI, people no longer talk much about “unfilmable” novels—or if they do, they generally mean novels that can’t easily be filmed because they’re too nebulous, or bulky, or purely...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bombast: Ad Hominem, Ad Nauseam
Some time ago a friend told me, with regard to my own online self-presentation: “It’s great how you tell everyone how terrible they are.” Now, the idea of being remembered as a critic at all is the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rep Diary: Seventies Domestic Discontent
The latest Film Comment Selects Double Feature brings together two adaptations from the early Seventies: one from a notorious source, Philip Roth’s seminal novel Portnoy's Complaint (pun intended),and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kaiju Shakedown: Angela Mao
High-powered Hollywood execs may claim that making a Wonder Woman feature film is “tricky,” but China doesn’t give a damn. It’s been putting ass-kicking women on screens since 1930 when the country’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Festivals: NewFest
New York’s most prominent LGBT film festival turns 26 this year—a milestone that occurs against a background of shifting politics, fortunes, and ideological fault lines within broader queer discourse....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Film of the Week: A Master Builder
Traditionally, about the most damning dismissal of any screen drama is to call it “filmed theater” (although Serge Daney once coined an even more damning epithet: "filmed cinema"). Film critics are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bombast: I Love Don Weis
Fourteen years ago as of tomorrow, Don Weis went to his reward. You may be excused for not immediately recognizing the significance of this event. In cinephile circles, the name “Don Weis” is probably...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Review: Letter to Momo
When Momo and her mother in A Letter to Momo move to the picturesque island of Shio to live with her grandparents, the city kid immediately comes off as a typically apathetic youth. Momo is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kaiju Shakedown: Kinji Fukasaku
Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Final Episode Forty years ago last month, on June 29, 1974, a shot of Hiroshima’s ruined Genbaku Dome hit cinema screens like an epitaph, marking the end of Battles...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Book Review: Alternative Movie Posters
Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground By Matthew Chojnacki Schiffer Publishing Ltd., $34.99 Billed as “the first book to document the spectacular art of underground film posters,”...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Film of the Week: Child of God
Given how productive he has been, James Franco has an oddly nebulous profile as a filmmaker. His IMDb listing reveals that he has directed 10 features solo, and several in collaboration—most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Is Softcore: The Films of Radley Metzger
This Is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger runs August 7 to 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Metzger in attendance at multiple shows. Score Pornographer, poet of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Review: Calvary
Not 10 minutes into John Michael McDonagh’s smartass passion play Calvary, a priest walks onto a beach in the noonday gloom, cassock blowing in the wind like a duster. Cutting through the waves is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rep Diary: Noel Black on Pretty Poison
Pretty Poison Whenever the name is mentioned in film circles, the question that always arises is “What ever happened to Noel Black?” In other words, how could a director who showed such huge promise...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kaiju Shakedown: Huang Jianxin
On August 9 & 11, the British Film Institute will screen The Black Cannon Incident, a 1985 work by director Huang Jianxin that’s part of the traveling Century of Chinese Cinema retrospective that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bombast: It’s War
Last week I finally saw Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, a film which takes place in a world where the handful of humans who’ve survived a devastating simian flu epidemic band together in the grandiose...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Film of the Week: Frank
Frank Sidebottom started life as a punk-generation songwriter and musician from Manchester, named Chris Sievey. Under his own name, Sievey had a number of minor successes with his band The Freshies...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Sound + Vision 2014: Pulp
Pulp screens Wednesday in Sound + Vision 2014 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “So, what, you're trying to get a snapshot of Sheffield? Like, the hopes and dreams of the common man?” asks Bomar,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Life Less Ordinary: The Films of Joaquim Pinto
At first glance, the Portuguese filmmaker Joaquim Pinto’s last two nonfiction features, released in the same year and both made in close collaboration with his husband Nuno Leonel, might seem...
View Article