You don’t get to describe a film as a farcical socialist thriller very often, but then most films aren’t like Berlin – 1st of May, a sort of anthology film following three intertwined adventures in the city of Berlin. I say “sort of” an anthology, because unlike the traditional example of the form, this isn’t […]
The history of the animated feature film does not begin, as most people tend to think and the Disney corporation tries to imply, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Rather, it begins 20 years earlier, with Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani’s satire El apóstol, a film lost after all known copies were destroyed […]
We’re accustomed to saying that a “contrived” story is necessarily unsatisfying, but Fatih Akin’s fascinating and brilliant The Edge of Heaven puts that notion to the test: the movie presents a tangled network connecting six people that could hardly be more contrived, and to add insult to injury, most of those contrivances don’t end up […]
It says something about the inestimable talents of German director F.W. Murnau that he directed not only the single most influential (and almost certainly the finest) horror movie of all time, 1922’s Nosferatu, but also a fable about the the simplicity of pastoral life, 1927’s Sunrise, which also just so happens to be one of […]
It doesn’t seem right that there should be “Werner Herzog’s first documentary.” His career ought to have sprung fully-formed. And yet here we are, with Werner Herzog’s first documentary, Land of Silence and Darkness. Or at least it’s his first feature-length documenatry, if we don’t count the sort of documantary-ish visual tone poem Fata Morgana. […]
Most of us who are out of our teens can probably agree that, although some extremely good movies are made in the modern day, all but the very best simply can’t compete with the films of the past. Especially in America, where even the “art film” is a marketable genre rather than an indicator of […]
The first thing that everyone knows about Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz is that it is long, one of the longest narrative films ever made, clocking in at more than 15 hours (more than 15.5 in the American, NTSC version). Everyone knows this because it is not an […]
Allegedly, when Stephen Frears learned that many Americans viewed The Queen – the story of a leader with a profound disconnect from her subjects – as an allegory for the Bush presidency, he was both shocked and a little confused that we’d be so anxious to appropriate a story that, to the director, was so […]
A throughline: only three days ago, I complained that Shortbus began and ended with the idea that sex is nice, and married that to Standard Indie Relationship Dramedy Template B-5. Now I’ve seen Princess, a film in which sex is not considered to be nice at all, and it makes Shortbus look like the finest […]
I try not to judge movies based on what I want them to be (in which I often fail), nor on my moral opinion of their content (in which I fail even more often). But I’m not in the least bit ashamed to confess that if a film is going to show a graphic rape […]
In 1976, a 23-year-old German woman named Anneliese Michel who had been treated for psychotic episodes died of starvation following an attempted exorcism. The attending priests and her parents were both convicted of manslaughter. This story was turned into two movies in the last two years: the first was the American The Exorcism of Emily […]
