Herzog vs Ferrara at the Venice Film Festival “It was shaping up to be the film festival’s equivalent of a pub brawl, a bloody showdown between two notorious loose cannons of world cinema. In the red corner: Abel Ferrara, the New York director of the original Bad Lieutenant. In the blue: German film-maker Werner Herzog, […]
Armond White comments that Stillman’s singular interest in character “reveals each one’s moral quest. The effort to behave decently, even by the most eccentric (self-serving) standards, gives Stillman’s upperclass stories a surprising kick and a fine grain.” It is marvelous to see these moral quests extend beyond the confines of a single movie, as a handful of familiar characters in fascinating variations are stripped of superficial childhood securities to make their slow, stumbling journeys toward grace.
Late last month Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, announced that the museum’s acclaimed 41-year-old weekend film series would end in November “in order to reconsider the nature, scale and scope” of the program. One big problem, he added later, was that the series had lost well over $1 […]
Criterion has just released Whit Stillman’s marvelous 1998 film The Last Days of Disco, and Filmwell will be celebrating the event with a series of reviews that consider all three of the director’s pictures.
It is a truism universally acknowledged, that Whit Stillman is the Jane Austen of indie film. But truisims only become truisms because they’re at least partly true, and this one most certainly is. . . .
“She had passed the day waiting for an apology from Ilsa Brooks, with whom she had had a falling out after arguing over a movie they had seen together on a recent Sunday afternoon. Ilsa had thought the film was a return to the screwball romantic comedies of the nineteen-thirties, but Mrs. Zegerman wanted to […]
One blog that’s reliably fascinating is If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. Predominantly visual, they regularly post intriguing images from film and other pop culture (and occasionally slightly higher culture, for that matter). Today’s post is nifty, screenshots that feature “frame within the frame” composition. Here’s a […]
Akira Kurosawa’s epic Samurai films are among the greatest movies ever made. But it is a quiet, intimate story about a very different sort of hero, a mid-level bureaucrat confronted with the futility of his own life, that may be the director’s masterpiece. Certainly it’s one of his most spiritual films.
Jacques Tourneur’s last journey into the fantastique genre is saturated with dialogue that goes straight to the heart of his favourite and most fascinating questions, evoking Charles Williams and even C.S. Lewis. Problem is, the narrative deck is stacked from the outset, so there’s no room for the sort of ambiguity and psychological suspense that make Tourneur’s earlier supernatural thrillers so effective.
Fans of the moody supernatural thrillers Jacques Tourneur lensed for Val Lewton in the forties or his noir masterpiece Out Of The Past may find little appeal in this sunny, easy-going tale of a small town parson set just after the American Civil War. But of the twenty-nine feature films he directed between 1939 and 1965, this is the one he fought to do. One wonders if he may have felt an affinity with the story’s central character, the transcendently decent Reverend Josiah Gray – prefiguring perhaps the greatest portrayal of small-town integrity to be found in American literature and film.