This debut feature from Paul Harrill has been getting a lot of press. Jeffrey Overstreet mentioned it in his Top Ten for 2014. Justin Chang wrote it up for Variety. Christianity Today posted an interview with Harrill. The NY Times featured it last week as a Critic’s Pick. And Darren Hughes hosted an insightful interview […]
There is a series of shots in Selma that called to mind a passage from Perez’s The Material Ghost. In this section, Perez is talking about the shot reverse shot convention. “The shot/reverse shot does not give us a bystander’s view: it has us stand in turn where each character stands.That people engaged in conversation will […]
I watched this quiet miracle of a film recently with my daughter. We have been taking painting lessons together, learning how to blend color, the tonal habits of different brushes, and little techniques artists use to paint things like clouds or shrubs. This made the film a real pleasure for us both, as Takahata’s animation is […]
It is that time of the year when with a heave and a sigh I launch my top ten list out among all the others, knowing that mere moments from clicking “publish” it will feel like a flimsy record of a really interesting year in cinema. I had more than usual titles floating around near […]
I am not sure what A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night actually is. It emerges from the recent crop of vampire films cloaked in a lot of little genre hooks, but then defies easy description once fully unleashed. It is also undeniably beautiful, even alluring. It takes place in Bad City, an Iranian town bordered by […]
In 1989, Fukuyama declared the “end of history” in the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Norte begins with a similar mouthful, kicked about by Fabian and his law school colleagues as they muse over beers about class and inequity in the current Philippines’ economy. This theme of ideology […]
Me and You is a small and quiet return of Bertolucci to the festival circuit. It has been almost a decade since The Dreamers. The film is much less ambitious in scope than most of his prior work. As a result, critics have been very mixed on whether the film eventually works or not. A Guardian reviewer even […]
Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory shared a simple theatrical frame My Dinner With Andre. The film is quintessential art house cinema, inspired internally by a choice quote from Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. Malle’s two-shot framing also presages a lot of the simplicity that would later characterize American indie cinema – convinced that something other than visual […]
The Theory of Everything is a film potentially about so much it runs into the problem of deciding what it has to say. The marriage of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde is well publicized – the subject of two separate and lengthy accounts by Wilde. The first, Music to Move the Stars gave way a few years […]