Claude Chabrol's second feature, Les Cousins, is, like his first film Le beau Serge, a study of opposites and dichotomies: urban/rural, innocent/worldly, intellectual/physical, sheltered/experienced. In Chabrol's first film, a bookish young man returns
Eric Rohmer's final film, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, is a charming, deeply felt ode to the follies and pleasures of devoted love, a fitting subject for this last statement from a director who always concerned himself with both the emotions and
It's time for the second discussion of the Inexhaustible Documents Record Club, which hosts monthly music conversations about albums chosen by various club members. This month, Kevin J. Olson of Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies has chosen Brand New's album
If you've seen Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life, chances are that you're as eager as Jason Bellamy and I have been to discuss, dissect and analyze this rich, dense, sometimes frustrating but always fascinating movie. In part 2 of our discussion
Wojciech Has' The Saragossa Manuscript, based on the novel by Jan Potocki, is a delightful, dizzying film that, over the course of three rapidly paced hours, unfurls a series of interconnected stories in which truth, fiction and fantasy deftly change
He Ran All the Way is an emotionally and narratively incoherent film that is, nevertheless, compelling in its raw examination of a family under pressure and a man without a family falling to pieces as he realizes just how unloved he really is. Nick Robey
It's usually taken for granted, but it's a little amazing that Woody Allen, well over 40 years into his career as a writer-director, continues to be so prolific, to work at the fevered pace of a young man, delivering a film, almost without fail, every
What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing In a Place Like This? was Martin Scorsese's first short student film, and like most student films it's an indication of promise rather than a real statement in itself. The film takes a nothing premise — a writer named
Eros is an anthology film that brings together shorts from three international directors — Hong Kong's Wong Kar Wai, American director Steven Soderbergh, and Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni — for an old-school throwback to the heyday of the portmanteau
Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up is a marvelously compelling documentary that, in the process of following the trial of a poor man accused of fraud, winds up delving into the nature of art and the relationship between fiction and deceit. The film is built
Harry Smith is perhaps best known for his stewardship of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music, an enthnomusicological attempt to preserve various folk traditions of the U.S. The multi-talented Smith was also an avant-garde filmmaker, and his 1946
Orson Welles' 1958 masterwork Touch of Evil came late in the generally accepted timeframe for the first wave of film noir, a form that especially thrived in the 40s and early 50s, but it is undeniably one of the pinnacles of the genre. It's a movie that's
