Review

By Elias Savada. Unless you’re orbiting the art universe, particularly in the vicinity of its comically subversive galaxy, you’ve probably never heard of Robert Cenedella, who is both a bastard (in the biblical sense) and an artist (in a mostly mythological/fantastical off-the beaten-path way) in Art Bastard, a sprightly designed look […]

A Book Review by Matthew Fullerton. New Tunisian Cinema is a timely book, released three years after the revolution that toppled Ben Ali, the dictator under whom the directors featured in Robert Lang’s study worked for much of their careers. It focuses on eight oeuvres from New Tunisian Cinema, a generation […]

By John Duncan Talbird. A few years ago, I was with my wife in some Brooklyn hamburger joint waiting for our food. It was one of those places where you are given an electronic device that vibrates when your food is on the tray and ready to consume. My device […]

By Elias Savada. French director-writer Jacques Audiard, a multiple Cannes Film Festival prize nominee and winner, and constant trophy collector at the César (French Oscar) ceremonies, should find a welcoming audience here in America with Dheepan. Here’s a brave, bittersweet tale about three unrelated Sri Lankan refugees cast adrift in France, […]

By Chris Neilan.  They may never have matched the creative successes of Scorsese & De Niro, the genre-defining feats of John Wayne & John Ford, or earned the cinephile kudos of Allen & Keaton, but as director-star partnerships go it’s hard to beat Sidney Pollack and Robert Redford for longevity […]

By Elias Savada. Terence Davies does love his literary adaptations. His 2011 romantic drama The Deep Blue Sea was based on Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play of post-war relationships gone bad. Three of Davies’ features spring from the books of others, including The Neon Bible (1996) and The House of Mirth (2000), […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. In November 1974, when Werner Herzog was thirty-two, he walked from Munich to Paris, over five hundred miles in three weeks. Herzog had received word that his friend and mentor, film critic and historian Lotte Eisner, was gravely ill and would probably die. Struck […]

By Paul Risker. “The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” – Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987) Desire is both a life sustaining and a destructive force, from which derives the human sin of greed. While desire is an emotional experience […]

By Jeremy Carr.  Ben Braddock, Dustin Hoffman’s titular character from Mike Nichols’ 1967 film, The Graduate, is first seen staring straight ahead aboard an airplane. He looks off in a trance-like gaze that will be repeated throughout the film. This type of far-away expression is the perfect physical pose— and […]

By Christopher Sharrett. When I think about the melodrama I tend to focus on the masterpieces of Max Ophuls, Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, Irving Rapper, Edmund Goulding, King Vidor, and others, all of whom helped define the concerns of the genre. My bias favoring American (or émigré) filmmakers has tended […]