For many folks, the Nineties represent the finest decade of Hong Kong filmmaking, and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with them. So many filmmakers — Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo, Tsui Hark, Jackie Chan, Johnnie To, Stephen Chow — were either at the top of the their game during that decade, or arrived at the top […]
Over at First Things today, an essay adapted from a speech by Armond White, chairman of the New York Film Critics’ Circle, titled “Do Movie Critics Matter?” – in which White is not fond of the Internet, blogs, Rotten Tomatoes, and lots of other things.
In this poem, Austin Alexis compares the recovery of a Haitian earthquake survivor to the beauty of a poem.
Bordwell wades into the recent film criticism debate sparked by the Chronicle editorial. A choice snippet: Last year I moderated an Ebertfest panel consisting of a dozen or so critics. A student from the audience said he wanted to be a critic too. Instead of advising him to get into a more financially rewarding form […]
Two things are certain about the legacy of Neon Genesis Evangelion. First, the fourteen years or so that have passed since its TV debut have done little, if anything, to diminish the shadow that it casts over the entire anime landscape. Indeed, nearly any anime title that involves giant robots, (young) characters struggling with psychological […]
I was chastened horribly a few weeks ago when Image published its Arts & Faith Top 100 list. My grand total of films watched? Nine. I studied animation, not film in general, and that apparently has left me with severe gaps in my education. So to remedy that, I intend to take on two or […]
As a regular critic for Paste, I was lucky enough to contribute to the list of the 50 best living directors that appeared in the March issue. (Martin Scorcese is #1; I contributed #23, David Cronenberg, and #12, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne.) There are some obvious omissions (I personally lamented the lack of Michel Gondry […]
The lineup for Tribeca is out. And yes, Shrek Forever is set to open it. As major New York film festivals go, Tribeca is the easiest for me to get into (mostly for the sheer number of screenings), but the one I’m least interested in going to. It’s so hard to sort through the crap […]
I’ve been teaching a research writing class to (mostly) first-year students this semester, and we’re using film as the basis for our inquiry. For their final assignment – worth over half their grade – I gave them a list of fifteen-or-so directors and told them to write something about the work of one of those […]