Review

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 […]

By Tony Williams. Whether available theatrically or 16mm, VHS, and previous DVD formats, Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950) has always ranked high as a great Hollywood film either in the realms of authorship or genre. This year Criterion has added the film to its collection and this version […]

A Book Review by Tony Williams. Today, it has become a tedious commonplace to listen to erroneous fallacies such as Fukayama’s “The End of History” – to which one can reply, “whose ideologically written history?” Since that time of unquestioned neo-liberal hegemonic control, other issues have appeared, including dismissals of a challenging […]

A Book Review by John Duncan Talbird. Many film lovers will enjoy Patton Oswalt’s new memoir, Silver Screen Fiend, mainly because he’s one of us. He and his friends – “sprocket fiends” all – when they’re not lurking in revival houses or art house cinemas, spend their times arguing in […]