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Without their appetites, some of our favorite big-screen characters just wouldn’t be the same. Without memorable movie meals, our minds and hearts might be malnourished.

For many people, the name “Hayao Miyazaki” is synonymous with the word “anime”. And understandably so: Miyazaki has been responsible for some of the finest examples of the artform, both in terms of aesthetics and storytelling, in the last three decades. But considering the fact that Miyazaki is nearing his seventies, and that he’s “threatened” […]

A little something to commemorate the occasion, forty years ago today: 11:35AM, August 8, 1969. from I Am Sam (Jessie Nelson, 2001) Edited from Wikipedia: In Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting the four main characters walk towards a climactic drug deal processing the “wrong” way across a street crossing: the scene takes place as they walk out […]

On mastering the art of home cooking.

Only you can stop this killing. You’ve got to make love with me! You can see why the God-haunted, Total-Depravity-Of-Man-obsessed ex-Calvinist Schrader would be drawn to this landmark supernatural thriller. But his sensibilities are all wrong for it, and the genius – not to mention the spiritual frisson – of the masterful original is completely […]

If you’re hoping for a horror movie, Zombie will disappoint. Even seemingly climactic scenes mystify rather than thrill: they pay off only in mood and a slow accumulation of character detail. Eventually, even the basic narrative seem to dissipate. Forced to fill in narrative gaps by intuition, we must assemble scraps of dialogue and details of behaviour into our best guess about what’s going on – a narrative strategy that forces us to “lean in” to the story, heightening our attention and tuning us to nuance, atmosphere, suggestion. However much we succeed in making sense of the story on repeat viewings, we’re left with unsettling questions, unsure we’ll ever have the full story. Kind of like life.

It’s a cliché to end all clichés: becoming a parent changes things. In my naiveté, though, I never really thought that the effect would extend to my movie-watching habits, to my cinéaste lifestyle. But with one child here, and another on its way, the truth is that my habits have irrevocably changed. All of that is to […]

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 […]

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.