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Deep Focus: Clouds of Sils Maria
I HATE OLD POETMEN! Especially old poetmen who retract who consult other old poetmen who speak their youth in whispers, saying:—I did those then but that was then that was then— O I would quiet old...
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Art of the Real: Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins
Like the work of the artist whose life and times it evokes, Peter Watkins’s 1974 film Edvard Munch comes off as a thing of frayed nerves, passionate resentments, and stray sexual frustrations, made on...
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Interview: Nick Broomfield
Nick Broomfield has come a long way from his first years as a documentary filmmaker in the early 1970s, when he made shorts about British housing projects and borrowed equipment from Frederick Wiseman...
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Festivals: L’immagine e la parola at Locarno
A springtime satellite to the Locarno Film Festival in August, L’immagine e la parola was inaugurated in 2013 with the intention of exploring the relationship between the moving image and the written...
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Art of the Real: Edgardo Cozarinsky
One of Edgardo Cozarinsky’s short stories pivots on a sentence that exemplifies the delicate tone—tender, sympathetic, gently ironic, a little tersely evaluative—of the Argentine writer-filmmaker’s...
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Deep Focus: Tangerines
Most Western moviegoers think that Abkhazia was where the wizards kept their prison in the Harry Potter saga, but Tangerines, a potent, intimate war movie about this contested pocket of the former...
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Film of the Week: Full Moon in Paris
For me, watching Eric Rohmer’s 1984 film Full Moon in Paris—Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, re-released this week—was a pure dose of that fabled malady, Proustian Rush. This is one of those Rohmer films...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Kuei Chih-hung
Virgins of the Seven Seas “Put frankly, Kuei was not a big-time director in the Shaw stable,” said screenwriter Szeto On in an interview about Kuei Chih-hung with the Hong Kong Film Archive. But while...
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Interview: Laura Citarella & Verónica Llinás
The story in Dog Lady is straightforward: on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, a woman lives with 10 dogs in relative isolation. We watch her survive through the seasons without money, scavenging off...
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The Soderbergh Variations: 2001, Recut
“Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous...
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Bombast: Decker
Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii What we call popular culture is, to a certain extent, a collective delusion, in which prognosticators, using sheer guesswork, assign importance to the herd movement of...
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Deep Focus: Ex Machina
Ex Machina is a high-IQ sci-fi film that connects viscerally and on every other level to audiences of all kinds. It’s exhilarating to see this movie in a theater packed with people rapt in the taut...
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Film of the Week: Iris
There’s a moment in Iris when the documentary’s subject, venerable fashionista Iris Apfel, is presented with a department-store carrier bag emblazoned with her own photo. The Iris on the bag has a...
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Interview: Naji Abu Nowar
For his debut feature Theeb, Jordanian filmmaker Naji Abu Nowar spent a year in the desert, living with and observing the customs of the last nomadic Bedouin tribe in Jordan. Set in 1916 at the fall...
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Interview: Robert Redford
On April 27, the 42nd annual Chaplin Award Gala at Film Society of Lincoln Center honors Robert Redford. In the March/April issue of FILM COMMENT, Beverly Walker wrote about Redford; below,...
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Interview: George Armitage
When, a few months ago, I set out to write something about George Armitage, who’d directed a few of the finest American genre movies of the last 40-odd years, I was surprised to learn that practically...
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Deep Focus: Avengers: Age of Ultron
Watching writer-director Joss Whedon handle the staggering number of superheroes, just plain heroes, sidekicks, super-enemies, super-frenemies, and super-friends with potential benefits in Avengers:...
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Bombast: Pop-Pop-Pop-Popular
Clouds of Sils Maria Olivier Assayas, a critic-turned-filmmaker with a confessed debt to Guy Debord, operates at the intersection of the essay and fiction film—a dubious proposition, save for the fact...
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Film of the Week: Far From Men
In Albert Camus’s 1942 novel L’Étranger (variously translated as The Outsider and The Stranger), the Algerian killed by the anti-hero Meursault has no name: he’s simply l’Arabe. That omission recently...
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Interview: Bertrand Bonello
“For me, films are born in the same way that poetry is born for poets; I don’t want to pose as a poet, but I would like to make an analogy. Some words, some images, some concepts come into the mind,...
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