The films of Wong Kar Wai are often about people who feel very intensely, who love and hate with a fiery passion that bursts out in the garish, expressive aesthetics of the films. In Happy Together, Wong examines this kind of passion especially intimately,
The latest conversation between Jason Bellamy and me has now been published at The House Next Door. With The Tree of Life just now arriving in at least some theaters, we take the opportunity to address the first four features of director Terrence Malick:
Brand New - The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)Thank you to everyone who made the first Record Club discussion, on the Congos' reggae classic Heart of the Congos, a big success. It was a fun and interesting conversation and a fine start to
The Congos - Heart of the Congos (1977)The Congos was the reggae vocal trio of Cedric Myton, Ryodel Johnson, and Watty Burnett, and Heart of the Congos was their debut album, recorded and produced by the legendary Lee "Scratch" Perry at his Black Ark
This is a reminder that on Monday, May 23, the Inexhaustible Documents Record Club will be kicking off with its first post, a discussion of Heart of the Congos, the debut album by reggae vocal group the Congos. The Record Club will have a monthly posting
The collage films of the filmmaker-artist Joseph Cornell, assembled from found footage — mangled commercial and documentary films and occasional specially shot sequences provided by Cornell's filmmaker friends — are strange masterpieces of excavation
Roberto Rosselini's Paisan was his second postwar film, made after his scrappy, low-budget Rome Open City, which was filmed in the immediate aftermath of World War II with any film stock he could scrape together. Paisan is similarly rough and minimalist,
At the heart of Kenji Mizoguchi's Gion bayashi is the effect of changing sexual politics coming into contact with the traditional role of the geisha in Japanese culture. The film represents a dialectic between the traditional understanding of a woman's
Alain Resnais has always been concerned with time and memory, and his best-known films revolve around these themes with almost obsessive dedication, as though locked into compulsive loops in which the same ideas recur with rhythmic regularity. The signature
It's appropriate that Bernardo Bertolucci, late in his life, should make a film like The Dreamers, which at this point, eight years after its release, remains his final film to date. If he never makes another, this will be a fitting and beautiful swan
We Won't Grow Old Together, as its title suggests, is about a tormented relationship. Jean (Jean Yanne), has been married to Françoise (Macha Meril) for years, but his relationship with his wife has been all but over for a long time — she's hardly ever
Michelangelo Antonioni, like many directors who later became known for their fictional features, started his career making documentary short films. His first was Gente del Po, shot in 1943 but not finished and released until 1947, its production hampered
Michelangelo Antonioni is the cinema's greatest chronicler of the modern era's disconnection and dehumanization, of the existential dilemmas created by the modern way of life. His first color film, Red Desert, is yet another entry in his peak period's
