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Festivals: Jerusalem
Dancing Arabs “Jerusalem is one of the strongest brands in the world!” Thus was contemporary marketing jargon applied to a 5,000-year-old city by Nir Barkat, the city’s mayor, speaking at the opening...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Lee Myung-Se
Gagman Lee Myung-Se taught me how to watch movies. It was 1999 and I was capable of shooting off my opinion gun, dashing out lines about how “this movie sucked” or “that movie is an embarrassment.” I...
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Film of the Week: Abuse of Weakness
Isabelle Huppert's acting is one of the great enigmas of cinema. You would never exactly think of her as a chameleon and yet, watching her on screen, you never really perceive her as “Isabelle...
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Bombast: Queens, City of Cinema (Part One)
Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the day will come when no one will be able to afford to live in New York City other than anthropomorphized sacks of money, of the sort carried by Rich Uncle...
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Bombast: Queens, City of Cinema (Part Two)
Read part one of "Queens, City of Cinema" here. Theater: Cinemart Cinemas, 106-03 Metropolitan Ave., Forest Hills I’ve been periodically visiting the Cinemart for years—it was a 20-minute drive from...
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Interview: Aleksandr Sokurov
Aleksandr Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse screens next Friday in Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Genre is the great friend of political allegory, particularly...
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Rep Diary: Forgotten Faces
Publicity still for Forgotten Faces Seventy-five percent of Hollywood’s silent film output is lost forever, dumped in the ocean, burned as scrap, or consigned to some other form of ignoble oblivion....
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Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s Red Hollywood
Red Hollywood has its exclusive theatrical run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “Red Hollywood and the Blacklist,” a series curated by Thom Andersen and featuring additional films related to the...
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Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi (Part One)
Hospital of the Transfiguration 1. The first mention of “invaders” in Edward Zebrowski’s Hospital of the Transfiguration comes nearly 20 minutes into the film. In the scene in question, the director...
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Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi (Part Two)
Kin-dza-dza! A distress call originates from a remote land. The senders implore the intervention of a more politically stable and technologically advanced state, to assist, enlighten, or liberate...
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Bombast: The Apple, After the Fall
Life and death are nothing but show business in twenty-and-fourteen. This paraphrase of a line from Menahem Golan’s 1980 The Apple, which I am indebted to a Twitter acquaintance for, was proven in...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Patrick Lung Kong
His name isn’t really Patrick Lung Kong. He’s not sure exactly how old he is because his mother isn’t confident she remembers his birthday. He says he was born in Hong Kong, but we have to take that...
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Interview: Catherine Breillat
In 2004 Catherine Breillat suffered a debilitating stroke and three years later, while slowly recovering, she began a relationship with Christophe Rocancourt, the already infamous “swindler of the...
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Interview: Fabio Grassadonia & Antonio Piazza
In the Italian thriller Salvo, the hit man of the title (Saleh Bakri) forges an unlikely connection with Rita (Sara Serraiocco), the blind sister of the man he is hired to kill. Two extended set...
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Film of the Week: Starred Up
Alan Clarke’s 1979 drama Scum, probably the best-known British film about life behind bars, features a scene in which Ray Winstone’s young offender thrashes the opposition among his fellow inmates,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Wild World of Bollywood
Bollywood is where celluloid craziness lives. The slab-o’-style opening of Don, the first dance number in Gumnaam, the moment when Amitabh Bachchan emerges from an enormous egg in Amar Akbar Anthony...
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Rep Diary: Marcel Hanoun
Une simple histoire The retrospective for Marcel Hanoun held at New York’s Anthology Film Archives this past spring represented a tremendous opportunity for those who have heard about the filmmaker’s...
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Bombast: Kim’s Video
I haven’t been by the last remaining Kim’s Video since word of its imminent closure arrived this year with the spring flowers. In point of fact, the store on First Avenue, the last redoubt of an...
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Interview: Pedro Costa
Horse Money is the long-awaited new feature from Pedro Costa, who casts Ventura (Colossal Youth) again to play a version of himself, alongside Vitalina Varela. A portion of the film previously...
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Interview: Alex Ross Perry
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Listen Up Philip will undoubtedly garner plenty of attention from critics and audiences for its distinctive, subdued humor and...
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