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Cannes Dispatch #4: Hou & Jia
Mountains May Depart Two hotly anticipated films by Asian auteurs were widely discussed in the final few days of the 68th Cannes Film Festival. Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin and...
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Interview: Josh & Benny Safdie
Few films in the main slate of the 2014 New York Film Festival matched the sheer rigor of the fourth feature by the Safdie Brothers, Heaven Knows What. Singularly committed to plumbing the depths of...
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Deep Focus: Aloha
Before a Los Angeles press screening of Aloha, writer/producer/director Cameron Crowe called it his “love letter to Hawaii.” Visually, that’s right. Cinematographer Eric Gautier matches his rapturous...
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Titanus: The Demon
Twenty minutes into Brunello Rondi’s 1963 psychological horror film The Demon, the beautiful, troubled Purif (Daliah Lavi) runs through the southern Italian hills and stares down at her village’s...
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Cannes Dispatch #5: Women and Cannes
Facing persistent criticism in recent years for a pronounced lack of women in its lineup, the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival—the most prestigious in the world—sought to turn the tide this...
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Bombast: The List
Lists which seriously endeavor to quantify and valuate for history—rather than personal edification—can be useful barometers of either popular opinion or a single publication’s editorial values....
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Rep Diary: Early Japanese Talkies
“The proverb says that beautiful people do not live long, but it also seems that good people have short lives. Naruse, Takizawa, Mizu-san, Inoue Shin—they all died much too soon,” Akira Kurosawa wrote...
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Cannes Interview: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
At Cannes this year, it was hard not to raise an eyebrow at the strangely divergent pair of fates afforded two former Palme d’Or winners. Gus Van Sant, the top prize-winner in 2003 for Elephant,...
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Deep Focus: Spy
Paul Feig’s Spy is a piquant pick-me-up. Unlike his borderline-insane buddy-cop farce The Heat (13), Feig’s espionage comedy hurtles along like a real action film. The tension crackles and the...
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Film of the Week: A Pigeon Sat a Branch Reflecting on Existence
It’s a common tactic, when defending filmmakers who stick doggedly to the same thematic or stylistic ground, to invoke Samuel Beckett. Yes, some artists repeat themselves; Beckett did it all the time,...
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Kaiju Shakedown: Girls with Guns
Naked Killer Want to see a 25-year-old moppet roller-skate across the hood of a car and clock a maniac in the chin with her wheels? How about watching a blonde from Delaware disable four thugs with a...
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Interview: Thom Andersen
Among active filmmakers, Thom Andersen seems almost uniquely unconcerned with doing what’s expected of him. His greatest critical success, Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), a survey of that city’s...
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Cannes Roundtable #2
Participants: Charlotte Garson, film critic for Etudes Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Film Museum Wesley Morris, staff writer for Grantland Anton Dolin, film critic for Moskovskie...
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Bombast: The Tribe
Taza, Son of Cochise Douglas Sirk’s Taza, Son of Cochise (54) is one of those Production Code Hollywood movies that’s a lot more interesting if you just ignore the last couple of minutes, which...
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Cannes Interview: Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Like Miguel Gomes’s six-hour comprehensive portrait of Portugal also showing in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature Mustang draws attention to cinema’s duty to document...
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Interview: Mia Wasikowska
“But you’re not a country doctor!” Emma Bovary’s sudden, severe reproach to her husband, Charles, marks a pivot in Mia Wasikowska’s rendering of this surely intimidating part. Her voice rises without...
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The Wolfpack: Wild Child x 5
The Film Society of Lincoln Center will screen The Wolfpack in a sneak preview on June 11 featuring a Q&A with Crystal Moselle and the Angulo Brothers. The film then opens at FSLC on June 12, with...
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Open Roads: N-Capace
Italian playwright, actress, and theatre director Eleonora Danco conducts a voiceover conversation with herself in her debut feature N-Capace, which screens tonight as part of Open Roads: New Italian...
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Film of the Week: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Ciné-snobs, enjoy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl while you can, because it will soon become one of those films that you roll your eyes at the mention of. The Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award winner...
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Deep Focus: Jurassic World
I didn’t buy the Old Testament tenet that “the iniquity of fathers will be visited upon children unto the third and fourth generations” until I started following Jurassic Park. The franchise started...
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