The initial response to Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York was fairly unanimous: it was a failure. Time has been fairly gentle on this film, but it’s not hard to see why audiences and critics in 1977 were so disappointed: if nothing else, the director’s earlier films like Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any […]
I had something else in mind for this weekend (I’m not saying what, in case I end up watching it later), but when I saw The Tingler would be playing on Turner Classic Movies, I knew that I didn’t have it in me to pass up my only chance to review a William Castle picture […]
Looking back at what I’ve written in this series over the past few weeks, I noticed that for a month now, I’ve only reviewed black-and-white movies: happy ones, sad ones, violent ones, funny ones, American ones, foreign ones: all very good and all monochromatic. It was time for what we sober types in the business […]
By the time we get to the scene where a wealthy widower has drugged his niece, a nun-in-training wearing his dead wife’s bridal grown, and is nuzzling her breasts with his face while she lies as still as a corpse, it’s pretty clear that Viridiana is a sort of unique movie. By the time, about […]
In 1921, one of the biggest movie stars in the world made his first feature-length picture, a 68-minute, 6-reel epic that traded on his familiar persona and added a new style of dramatic pathos to his beloved slapstick. By that point, Charles Chaplin was already a bona fide auteur, decades before that word would be […]
A film with few precursors and few successors, The Battle of Algiers practically demands the use of hyperbole, so here I go: this is one of the most unique films in history, freely blending cinéma vérité inspired faux-documentary, psychological profiling, social commentary, Marxist anti-colonialism, horrifying violence, and good old-fashioned raw emotional power that all add […]
I think it best to begin by explaining what Down by Law isn’t: a prison escape movie, a study of the places and cultures of Louisiana, a buddy movie, or a cryptic celebration of beatnik jazz. It’s important to clarify that, because it seems like it should be all of those things at once: full […]
The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness – irony, satire – seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality. –Susan Sontag It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever. –David St. Hubbins This is my happening […]
They tell us that the French are the greatest romancers in the world (compared to the greatest Romantics, who would of course be the Germans). To this end, I spent my Valentine’s Day watching a film directed by a French filmmaker whose 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is essentially synonymous with “gorgeously sad French […]
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. […]
Out of more than 80 films spanning from the silent era to the mid-1950s, Life of Oharu from 1952 was the film of Mizoguchi Kenji’s career – a project that he was so desperate to make that he abandoned the company, Shochiku, where he had worked for years and accepted an extremely small budget from […]
The film that made an international success out of Mike Leigh begins with what I genuinely believe to be the most terrifying opening shot I have ever seen. As we hear a woman moaning in either pain or ecstasy, the handheld camera moves down a dark alley, shaking like an there’s earthquake, and it stops […]
