I would like to make some grand statement about the characteristic aesthetic of French filmmaker Claire Denis, but I cannot do that. Just a couple of days ago, the only one of her films that I’d seen was 2004’s The Intruder, and it’s brilliant, the kind of movie that makes you want to learn everything […]

By most accounts, the set of Alan J. Pakula’s sixteenth and final film as a director was not a happy set. The Devil’s Own began life when the up-and-coming new movie star Brad Pitt attached himself to a screenplay about an IRA terrorist who journeys to New York City in 1993 to complete an arms […]

There is a conceit whose origination I have never quite been able to track down: “Mythology is religion that nobody practices any more”. This little quote has quite a lot of utility, for besides being pithy, it provides an aid and comfort to we atheists and agnostics – give it another few centuries, and schoolchildren […]

Sometimes DI – digital intermediate, that is, the computer-aided manipulation of film to alter the color balance and saturation of the footage – works pretty well. And sometimes, you see a movie that is so aggressively, stupidly DI’d that you’re just like, “Fuck me, that is a lot of DI.” Okay, so you probably do […]

Occasionally, one stumbles across a movie so pure in its concept and execution that it doesn’t seem right at all to try and crack it open, to explain how it works; it’s much more tempting to just grab every man, woman and child you stumble across and beg them to please, for the love of […]

There’s no satiric genre filmmaking like Italian satiric genre filmmaking, as I’ve always said. Or at least, as I’ve always meant to have said. At any rate, I offer as proof of this notion a snotty poliziesco (“police film”) from the underseen social satirist Elio Petri, one of those Italian films with an outstanding chunky, […]

In a certain sense, we should be grateful for The Pelican Brief, because of the very particular case study it offers in the changing face of filmmaking: not just in the context of Alan J. Pakula’s career, but in the difference between the 1970s and the 1990s more generally. For The Pelican Brief recalls Pakula’s […]

Apparently, the new teen sex comedy/social satire Youth in Revolt is derived from a series of novels that everybody but me has read (or, at a minimum, heard of before seeing author C.D. Payne named in the opening credits). And I can safely judge from the general tone of reviews that everybody but me has […]

Imagine that you are very good friends with noted crazed visionary director Terry Gilliam. One day, you and he are having a slumber party, and he says, “I have a marvelous game for us to play” (yes, Gilliam speaks like an Edwardian tween. Work with me). Then, he bundles you up in a pillowcase large […]

We return at last to the steady and certain decline of Alan J. Pakula, who went from intelligent producer of prestige dramas for adults in the 1960s, to director of fascinating character studies and brilliant thrillers in the 1970s, and one of the defining American filmmakers of that period, a privilege that he is never […]

On December 15, 1939, a film premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. It was titled Gone with the Wind, and a more extraordinary example of all the vast lushness that Hollywood can buy had never been seen and never will again. That is the genius of the notorious producer-showman David O. Selznick, a man who made no […]

Given an invisible theatrical release in the summer of 2009, and then seemingly disappeared into whatever ether awaits HBO Documentary Films acquisitions before they get around to airing on HBO, the Danish documentary Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country absolutely deserves better than its fate. Not that a film about Burmese monks organising a […]