M.S. Smith

Lucrecia Martel's Immersive Cinema

I didn’t notice a single deep-focus shot in the entire eighty-seven minutes of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza), which recently screened with Martel in attendance at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles. Virtually every frame, like the one above, contains a shallow depth-of-field, with the point of focus preserved almost […]

Ron Reed

Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 1): Cat People (1942)

Psychologically complex, genuinely sexy, hauntingly sad – and when it comes to the creepy stuff, Cat People plays for keeps. Tourneur’s aren’t called “supernatural thrillers” for nothing: the films are both thrilling and theological. The supernatural is rendered spiritual, otherworldliness is grounded in the everyday world, and sin and the human condition are taken seriously.

Ron Reed

Did Leigh Film Trigger New Legislation?

Film-makers Shaping The Course Of History Trusted sources speculate that the 2008 hit film Happy-Go-Lucky may have triggered recent FDA approval of ground-breaking new medication, placing director Mike Leigh among a small but influential group of film-makers that includes such luminaries as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Errol Morris, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The landmark Errol Morris […]

Mike Hertenstein

My Arms Are Too Short to Box With Godard

According to my 1967 edition of Godard by Richard Roud, the director’s “latest” films — Made in USA and Two or Three Things I Know About Her — represent a summing up of his career thus far. Filmed more-or-less simultaneously, the films make an informal diptych, says Roud…

Jason Morehead

Filmwell's Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 4 – Tarkovsky

From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky: I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and […]

Elizabeth Hoover

Inquiry: Detail

This is a second poem by Elizabeth Hoover that uses the photography of Saul Leiter as a source for meditative dialogue on the nature of an image.

Elizabeth Hoover

Inquiry: The Image

This poem by Elizabeth Hoover uses the photography of Saul Leiter as a source for a meditative dialogue on the nature of an image.

Alissa Wilkinson

In the Loop (Iannucci, 2009)

It’s not what you’d call nuanced, or sympathetic, or thoughtful, but In the Loop is smart and wince-inducingly, bitingly, great.