Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a great sensualist, a director who revels in the sensory and emotional qualities of a particular moment in time and the setting in which it takes place. His feature films are collections of these moments, strung together
Maurice Pialat's Graduate First... is an incisive portrait of small town life for a group of young friends waiting to take the bac, the test that's necessary to get a degree and, in theory at least, greater job opportunities. In practice, this last ritual
My latest conversation with Jason Bellamy is a discussion about two Hitchcock films that are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to be "minor" entries in the great director's career: To Catch a Thief and Rope. In talking about these two very different
Bleak, creepy and, once its true horror premise is belatedly revealed after a lengthy and patient build-up, absolutely brutal, The Descent is as good as minimal, no-frills horror gets. A group of friends, all young women, meet up for yearly adventures
Jean Renoir's La nuit du carrefour is a rough, gritty film noir, set, as its title suggests, in a seeming perpetual night at a sleepy rural crossroads, a small settlement with just three houses and a gas station. This way station is always bathed in
I know I haven't lived up to my promise of posting, but I just haven't had the energy to do so lately. I had to pay my respects to the alpha mother of Black film, Lena Horne. I used this pic cause she looks almost exactly like my grandmother here--something
The great cinematographer William Lubtchansky has passed away at the age of 72. He has had a long and fertile career working with Godard, Rivette, Straub/Huillet, Garrel, Varda, Otar Iosseliani, and countless others. In particular, Lubtchansky worked
Eric Rohmer's debut film, The Sign of Leo, is very different from the films Rohmer would later become known for. The director who would soon enough be acclaimed for his philosophical examinations of love and morality, with protagonists constantly talking,
It's been literally decades since Werner Herzog has made a truly satisfying fictional film. It seems obvious that, since at least the late 1980s, the director's interest has increasingly turned towards documentary and pseudo-documentary, while his fiction
