In January, I began this “Top 1000” project with The Leopard, a film about the declining fortunes of the Italian nobility during the Risorgimento. It was the first film I’d seen by director Luchino Visconti, I observed, and a damn fine introduction; enough so that in the months since then, I’ve become quite the little […]
The party line on Tony Richardson’s 1963 adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is that it is a period film done up in the style of the French New Wave, which is a little bit accurate and a whole lot reductive. It’s an easy point to forget that there were many styles of filmmaking in […]
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 […]
The films of John Cassavetes have quite a bit in common, thematically and aesthetically, with one of the most famous and most obvious being the function of actors in his style. In a Cassavetes picture, performance isn’t necessarily important because of how it reveals character, but because of how it reveals the process of performing: […]
L’enfance croit ce qu’on lui raconte et ne le met pas en doute. Elle croit qu’une rose qu’on cueille peut attirer des drames dans une famille. Elle croit que les mans d’une bête humaine qui tue se mettent à fumer et que cette bê on a honte lorsqu’une jeune fille habite sa maison. Elle croit […]
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 […]
As much as anybody can be, Jean-Pierre Léaud is the face of the French New Wave, and thus it is well that he so dominates Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, a three and a half hour monolith that stands Janus-faced as both the last film of that movement and perhaps the […]
Stanley Kubrick once said, “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t,” which is actually a pretty fair criticism if you stop and think about it. By the same token, we might call the exhausting 1985 documentary Shoah a movie about a few dozen […]
One of the chief pleasures of blogging is that you get to set your own rules. Which means, for example, that if I want to take my weekly classic movie review to shill for a new DVD release, then I can damn well do so. Specifically, I’d like to take a moment to talk about […]
“And then he looked around him again, at the big hotel room, the almost untouched tray of liquor, and back at Newton, reclining in bed. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to believe. To sit in this room and believe that I’m talking to a man from another planet.’ “‘Yes,’ Newton said, ‘I’ve thought that […]
It is sometimes the case that a movie opens with a moment so perfect that you just know that no matter what happens, it is going to own you body and soul. Such is the case with Georges Franju’s extraordinarily influential horror film Eyes Without a Face, which opens with a musical theme that sounds […]
Blame it on a lack of sleep or whatever you like, but at around 3:00 AM, when I finished this review, I somehow failed to publish it. I think you will find it not worth the wait. At first, it seems that El Topo will be a fairly standard narrative film, albeit one made by […]
