A review requested by Christopher Pufall, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Slightly more than a quarter of a century since it premiered (and slightly less than a quarter of a century since the first and only time I’ve seen it prior to now), I’m honestly shocked by […]
A review requested by André Robichaud, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. The apparent subject of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s second feature, Andrei Rublev, is indicated right in the title: it’s a story of the life of the most renowned painter of icons in medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev […]
Having been shot in color and on media that doesn’t look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz’s […]
There’s no good in hiding the obvious: director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s seventh feature Winter Sleep, winner of the 2014 Palme d’Or, is three hours and sixteen minutes long, with most of that time given to people talking. This is a shallow observation, but the film emphasises the weight of its running time to an extreme […]
And so, Nymphomaniac; or is it Nymph()maniac? There are more than just cosmetic reasons for the latter to count as the actual title, since the dividing line between nymph and maniac is even more important to the film’s project than the fact that an open parenthesis followed directly by a close parenthesis looks in the […]
The classic version of the story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ruined everything, just absolutely every god-damned thing, when they released their big ol’ popcorn movies Jaws and Star Wars in 1975 and ’77, and made all the studios go “Whoa! We don’t want to keep making little movies about the lives of […]
Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time – maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. […]
The signal characteristic of Otto Preminger’s Exodus from 1960, a story of the founding of the modern state of Israel, has nothing to do with the film’s sensitive political content; nothing to do with the iconic, stirring Romantic main theme of Eric Gold’s deservedly Oscar-winning score; nothing to with the fact that this is the […]
Just the name can send a shiver down the spine of the ill-prepared cinephile. Sátántangó. For Tarr Béla’s 7+ hour signature work is one of the endurance tests to tend all endurance tests in the art form of film. It is not the longest movie; even without leaving the realm of (relatively) conventional narrative cinema, […]
Fairly early in Frederick Wiseman’s documentary At Berkeley – “fairly” early in that the usual rules about duration in the context of a 4 hour and 4 minute movie need to be seriously re-evaluated – a UC-Berkeley undergraduate offers up the suggestion that in the past, college students were more motivated by having opportunities to […]
Screens at CIFF: 10/13 World premiere: 19 May, 2013, Cannes International Film Festival There is a great deal to be said about The Last of the Unjust, and since it is three hours and 38 minutes long, this is a good thing – if one invested that kind of time in watching a movie and […]
My primary objection to the massively successful, award-winning, generation defining The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2003’s conclusion to the film trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s multi-volume fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings, is not an original one, nor a clever and insightful one, nor a […]
