The first thing I must confess is that I lost a losing battle to fatigue for the first (and so far only) time at this year’s fest to a movie that was clearly better than that; but many great films are also slow-moving to the point of lethargy when you’re not pulling all nighter’s one […]

It was, of course, a fait accompli that the great success of Bride of Frankenstein, Universal’s first horror sequel, was going to quickly lead to a follow-up to Dracula. It is perhaps nothing more than a lazy quirk of history that this film would even follow the same route of adding female relative to the […]

To a certain extent, the films Tsai Ming-Liang are all of a piece; if you really love one of them (and there are few contemporary directors who are more of an acquired taste than Tsai Ming-Liang; his movies are famous for extraordinarily lengthy takes, often from a static camera, and if you don’t have a […]

Last winter, writer-director Lukas Moodysson debuted his first English-language film, Mammoth, at the Berlin Festival to what I have read was a fairly brutal response; this honestly shocks me a little bit. I haven’t read many of those early reviews at all (most of the ones I could find were in German), but the extremely […]

At his best, François Ozon can be either a keen observer of humanity at its most stressed-out and self-immolating (Under the Sand, Time to Leave), or he can toss out self-aware provocations like spitballs (Swimming Pool, 5×2). I don’t know that I have a set idea of Ozon at his worst, because until Ricky I […]

I am either the ideal person to discuss Paranormal Activity, or the absolute worst person imaginable. See, up until really recently, I didn’t have any idea that the film was apparently the object of a huge viral marketing blitz. Somewhere, I picked up that it was made for under $20,000, and I was aware that […]

My interest in seeing Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl was primarily historical: it is the first time in history that a film was made by a 100-year-old director, Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira. His first film, a short documentary, was released 78 years ago, meaning that not only is de Oliveira himself the oldest filmmaker […]

To my mind, Iran currently has one of the most interesting and important national cinemas in the world right now, so About Elly is a film for which I had, perhaps, unreasonably high expectations. On first glance, it’s rather unlike what we’ve become accustomed to thinking about when we think about Iranian cinema; and this […]

With his brace of mid-’70s paranoia epics out of his system, Alan J. Pakula’s career settled back into a much more characteristic mode when he made his fifth feature two years after the critical and commercial triumph of All the President’s Men. 1978’s Comes a Horseman would prove to be a fairly intimate, domestic story […]

I am having a rough festival for documentaries. First it was Cropsey, a film that I could only give such qualified praise that I might as well have come right out and call it a trainwreck. The offender this time is Cooking History, a film with what I thought sounded like an irresistibly sexy hook: […]

The massive success of 1931’s twin gods, Dracula and Frankenstein, left no doubt that Universal Pictures was Hollywood’s home for terror and the paranormal, and the studio flung itself into the burgeoning new genre with glee, whatever lingering moral qualms Carl Laemmle, Sr. might still have nursed. The next two years bore witness to the […]

Bong Joon-Ho’s third feature, the amazing giant monster movie/intimate family drama The Host instantly shot him to the very top of the list of “South Korean Directors To Look Out For” – a list that has become altogether crowded in the last decade, making Bong’s immediate fame that much more impressive. Three years later, and […]