Jeffrey Overstreet

Here comes Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I’ve been curious about it, but then a critic put into words the very problem that has made me suspicious.

Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialog in your films? Jean-Pierre Dardenne: In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking…. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a […]

From Notes on the Cinematographer: Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises […]

If Oscar Wilde had been a film critic, which films in this week’s top 10 might have provoked this response? “The public have always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what […]

The term “free” is relative in Iran. Let us say that Jafar Panahi is alive and out of prison. Here is the latest update at The Guardian. This is a tremendous relief to all of who love him and his work. But he has reminded the world – or at least those who pay attention […]

“Models. What they lose in apparent prominence during the shooting, they gain in depth and truth on the screen. It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.” – Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Cinema, as Tarkovsky has shown, has vast potential to move into the depths. Yet it uses them just as infrequently as television uses its capacities. Rarely do we see on the screen something that enriches our soul, and doesn’t pull it out onto the surface, onto the field of petty passions. Of course, art cannot […]

“I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we’ve got after 100 years — a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there’s always a necessity to start with text and finish with image. I don’t think that’s particularly where we should […]

I recently showed Laurent Cantet’s The Class to a couple of French-language instructors at Seattle Pacific University. Both have experience teaching in the French high school system, and one of them has sons who grew up in French education. They had some interesting observations on the film, which are published at the site for Seattle […]