At the time I write these words in the winter of 2010, Finding Nemo is the highest-grossing of all ten Pixar films, and anecdotally, the one that seems to be the closest we come to a consensus pick for their greatest work. And why not? It’s arguably the most structurally sound of all their narratives, […]

No film by the chameleon-like director Olivier Assayas met with as much brutal misunderstanding – at least, in the United States; I cannot speak to its reception in Europe – as 2002’s demonlover, a stupendously intelligent assault on globalism, e-commerce, the media, corporate culture – oh, and violent pornography, although insofar as the movie has […]

If Amores perros had not premiered in the summer of 2000, it would be necessary to lie and say that it had done so; offhand I cannot name another movie which has ever thus stood at the forefront of what would turn out to be a number of different trends in the decade to follow, […]

The reception of anime in the West has followed a torturous path: in the ’60s, it was a cheap source of awful children’s programming; in the ’80s, it was an underground font of bent sexuality and hyper-stylised violence; in the ’00s it had firmly entrenched itself as, if not a mainstream form of cinematic entertainment, […]