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Deep Focus: Big Hero 6
In Disney’s Big Hero 6, a 14-year-old tech upstart named Hiro designs a “neurocranial” transmitter that deploys tiny robots—“microbots,” he calls them—to create any object he can imagine. What better...
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Interview: Lucie Borleteau
For FILM COMMENT's festival report on Locarno, see Chris Darke's article in the November/December issue. Far from a conventional love triangle, Fidelio: Alice’s Journey is a daring exploration of...
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Interview: Robert Drew
“I was at Life magazine producing picture stories, and I wondered why documentaries on television were dull.” That was something probably a lot of other people were wondering in the 1950s, when Robert...
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Festival: Projections at NYFF
The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Projections series gracefully bore the traces of its esteemed predecessor—the 17-years-running Views from the Avant-Garde section of the New York Film...
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Rep Diary: Shark Monroe & To the Last Man
Every film contains its own private history: of career trajectories, artistic temperaments, and the texture of its landscapes. When the film is lost or unseen, that history goes dark with it. The To...
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Deep Focus: The Homesman
Tommy Lee Jones, who reached a midcareer high in the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (and later directed McCarthy’s “novel in dramatic form,” The Sunset Limited,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Jimmy Wong Yu
The One-Armed Swordsman In 1967, The One-Armed Swordsman burst onto Hong Kong screens as anti-colonialist riots swept the city. The carnage unleashed in that year turned the city into a war zone: in...
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Review: Dumb and Dumber To
Twenty years off has not dimmed the dimwittedness of Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels), the morons of Dumb and Dumber and now its sequel. Though their faces have become riven...
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Film of the Week: Foxcatcher
A story can feel entirely different depending on whether you know the ending in advance; that’s implicit in the nature of tragedy, which addresses your awareness of watching the inexorable workings of...
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Rep Diary: Tropicália
The Red Light Bandit Observed through the prism of the 20th century, the avant-garde, be it artistic or cinematic, is usually associated with the Western hemisphere. A mix of provincial ignorance and...
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Fassbinder Diary #1: Rio das Mortes
Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist (Part 2) continues at Film Society of Lincoln Center through November 26. “I couldn’t relate to the characters.” That statement is probably the fastest way to get me to...
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Film of the Week: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A term beloved of French film critics—and one I never tire of borrowing, just because it pinpoints its referent so well—is OVNI, meaning “UFO.” It’s used to refer to a film, usually a first feature,...
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Deep Focus: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1
Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 features several stirring set pieces, but it’s mostly an epic of inaction. I mean that as a compliment. This unusual and affecting entry in the...
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Bombast: Carole Eastman
Writing about Monte Hellman’s 1966 deathtrip Western The Shooting in the pages of FILM COMMENT in 2000, Chuck Stephens refers to the name of Warren Oates’s character, “Willet Gashade,” as “a moniker...
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Living Cinema: Experimental Film and the Academy
James Benning's Ruhr The first creative challenge faced by the inaugural class of Master’s students in Experimental & Documentary Arts at Duke—the first MFA degree to be offered at the...
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Festivals: Scary Movies 8
A song by the punk cabaret troupe The Tiger Lillies begins with ringleader Martyn Jacques cackling in his inimitable falsetto: “I could’ve been a killer.” You might say many of the protagonists in...
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Interview: Chienn Hsiang
Exit, the debut feature of longtime director of photography Chienn Hsiang, is startlingly accomplished. In scenes that play out with scant dialogue, the daily rhythms of Ling, an isolated, middle-aged...
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Fassbinder Diary #2: In a Year of 13 Moons
Germany in Autumn I was a sophomore in college when I saw In a Year of 13 Moons for the first time, and it was my introduction to Fassbinder. The year prior I had excitedly highlighted David Bordwell...
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Deep Focus: The Imitation Game
The Imitation Game is a tremendously engaging work of historical fiction about Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius who was key to cracking the military codes of the Nazis’ “unbreakable”...
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Film of the Week: The Babadook
Strange, isn’t it, how in films about haunted houses, the TV always seems at some point to be tuned to a station that’s showing old black-and-white cartoons about the Big Bad Wolf; I guess the Primal...
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