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Film of the Week: Wetlands
In 2008, Charlotte Roche—a British-born, German-raised TV presenter—shocked Germany with a book about women’s bodies and dissident hygiene. Her novel Wetlands became a best-selling succès de scandale,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Eileen Chang
Where are the women in Hong Kong movies? According to conventional wisdom, if you want to make a blockbuster these days, you need to get a Mainland actress and a Hong Kong actor. Hong Kong had its...
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Interview: Stephen Lack
Scanners “Why are you such a derelict, such a piece of human junk?” Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan) demands of the bewildered man bound to the bed in his laboratory in David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981)....
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Festivals: Telluride
Standing at the front of a jewel-box theater in Telluride over the weekend, Alexander Payne called a 12-minute movie about a cat on the run “one of the first examples of pure cinema that I know.” He...
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Bombast: Zeitgeist
If you’re like me, and I know I am, one of your great pleasures is visiting Observations on film art, the blog maintained by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, professors at the University of...
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Interview: Eugène Green
Perhaps as a side effect of being forced to watch Battleship Potemkin multiple times in film school, many contemporary critics use “formalist” as a pejorative. However, the films of Eugène Green...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Ringo Lam
City on Fire Not as flashy as John Woo, never as hyperkinetic as Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam is one of Hong Kong’s most underappreciated directors. He made his name with sophisticated, downbeat crime dramas...
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Festivals: Midnight Sun
The Wonders The Midnight Sun Festival in Finland defies the see-it-first mandate that guides so much programming and critical response, but without being a mere exercise in cinephilic nostalgia....
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Film of the Week: Stray Dogs
When Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs premiered in Venice last year, Guy Lodge predicted in his Variety review that the film would only appeal to the director’s hardcore fans, and that it was possibly...
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Interview: Lawrence Block
In 1976, the alcoholic ex-cop Matthew Scudder solved his first murder as an unlicensed private investigator. He continued closing unsavory cases for 35 years, a restless witness to the changing...
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Review: 20,000 Days on Earth
Visual artists Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard’s debut feature 20,000 Days on Earth is a dreamlike, contemplative film about the Australian musician, actor, and author Nick Cave. Drawing small...
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Rep Diary: Two by Richard Linklater
“Details is my middle name, all right?” —Matthew McConaughey as Willis Newton “I am the victim—the happy victim—of my environment.” —Jean Renoir while promoting The Crime of Monsieur Lange in 1936...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Ilo Ilo
This week, 30-year-old Anthony Chen’s quiet domestic drama, Ilo Ilo, arrives on DVD in the U.S. from boutique label, Film Movement. It’s a sign of how much the foreign film landscape has changed since...
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Bombast: Blitz Package
The first sere leaf has touched the pavement, and the NFL season has begun anew. What this means, for practical purposes, is that from now until the beginning of February next year, I will willingly...
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Film of the Week: Pride
Matthew Warchus’s Pride isn’t actually a musical, but it belongs to a strain of British films that I think of as “nearly political musicals.” That is, they’re nearly musicals—and if you wanted to be...
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Rep Diary: The Path of Oil
Bernardo Bertolucci is an unlikely director to venture into documentary. In his features, the real world is usually kept at a considerable distance from the hermetic, interior spaces in which his...
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NYFF: The 1968 Edition
Yes, I know. I was a teenaged know-it-all, as well as a rabid soixante-huitard, a serious pothead, occasional speed freak, and fanatical cinephile. I spent the summer of 1968, between my sophomore and...
View ArticleBook Review: The Films in My Life
François Truffaut was in his early twenties when he wrote much of the film criticism that first made him famous. Soon after being encouraged to pursue the profession by his mentor André Bazin in 1953,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Takashi Miike
Every director has a few embarrassments chained up in the attic of his or her filmography, but not Takashi Miike. “I never made a movie I didn’t want to make,” he said in an interview back in 2001,...
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Interview: Martín Rejtman
Like many artists who straddle different mediums, Argentine filmmaker and novelist Martín Rejtman has alternated his focus over the course over his 28-year career, which in part explains the...
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