The late Imamura Shohei is the kind of filmmaker who is too easily described as underrated, in spite of the evidence. The fact is, Imamura is very well-rated indeed; he’s quite probably the internationally best-known Japanese director of his generation. But for those of us who love his work, it doesn’t seem right that he […]
Those Eastern Europeans and their black comedies! Would anyone else think to open a film as Jiří Menzel’s 1966 Closely Watched Trains opens, with a slacker protagonist recalling how his forebears all spent their lives doing the least work possible, and how their violent deaths came about? I guarantee you have never laughed so hard […]
Settle in, dear reader, for one of the biggest and splashiest epics that Hollywood ever produced, the story of Judah Ben-Hur, prince of Judea, whose family and fortune were stolen away, who became a galley slave before rescuing a rich Roman and becoming a child of privilege in the wealthiest society in the world, who […]
Sometimes, you have to wonder if the censors in the Soviet Union just plain hated art. It seems, doesn’t it, that just about every great filmmaker to come out of that country had at least one of their films stomped on by the House That Stalin Built, whether that film could be properly called “counter-revolutionary” […]
Scholarship is a living, breathing animal. Go back a few years – not that many, maybe not even a full decade – and you’ll find this conventional wisdom about the rise of European “Art Cinema” in the 1950s: Ingmar Bergman, master of the form, burst out fully formed with his 17th and 18th features, The […]
Confronted with a film that seems to come out of nowhere, and do things that no other film in my experience has done in quite the same way, my brain struggles mightily to come up with some comfortably familiar framework to fit that film, and here’s what I’ve come up with for Johnny Guitar: it’s […]
It’s an embarrassing thing to say about one of the highest-regarded Soviet art films ever produced, but try though I might, as I watched Sergei Parajanov’s Color of Pomegranates, I could never quite shake the ghost of Monty Python’s parodies of inscrutable art films. You know what I’m talking about, if you’ve seen enough Flying […]
Isn’t it romantic, Music in the night, a dream that can be heard? The first “talkie” – the first sync sound motion picture with spoken dialogue – was also the first musical, Warner’s The Jazz Singer from 1927. And in the first years that followed the release of that landmark, the history of sound cinema […]
The second of two reviews. The first can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]
The first of two reviews. The second can be found here. In 1988, Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz released Dekalog, a ten-episode TV miniseries explicating each of the Ten Commandments, that is acclaimed from virtually every corner as one of the essential masterpieces of world cinema. In the same year, the […]
Sometimes a movie just comes right along and punches a hole in your gut, and for me, Vampyr was just such a movie. Like any halfway decent connoisseur of paranormal horror and inordinately artsy European films, I’ve known about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film for ages, but somehow I’d managed to go without seeing […]
In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a “multi-reel”, “feature-length” movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in […]
