Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Diary of a Country Priest, from 1951, was the third feature film directed by French director Robert Bresson, and it is the hinge on which his entire career pivots. Prior to this point, he made the kind of films people were making in France in the ’40s: solemn melodramas for respectable middle class audiences who […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: director Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reminds us of the wide range of approaches that filmmakers […]

There’s been a lot of chatter lately, among a certain kind of cinephile – my kind, I will admit up front, though I don’t really talk about it here – about the impending death of celluloid film as a production, distribution, and archival medium in the United States. Naturally inclining to pessimism, I suspect that […]

“Le film, c’est le monde. Vraiment, en une heure et demi, en une heure quarante, voir le monde.” -Jean-Luc Godard [“The film is the world. Truly, in an hour and a half, you see the world,”] In the opening moments of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au hasard Balthazar* something remarkable happens that sets the tone […]