The Joan of Arc themes, acknowledged debt to Béla Tarr, and unavoidable comparisons to Lars von Trier catch one’s attention, but Michael Brooke’s skeptical Sight & Sound review suggest that Mundruczó may be echoing the worst rather than the best of his influences. Still, Brooke says Delta looks great, and at 95 minutes (so much […]
Which of these ten unlikely (and yet strangely exciting) matches of director and remake is actually going forward? Michael Bay’s Down By Law Woody Allen’s The Seventh Seal Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple Whit Stillman’s Fletch Agnes Varda’s Flight of the Navigator Gus Van Sant’s Tron 2.0 Charlie Kaufman’s The Sound of Music John Woo’s The Long […]
I will make him with red hair and a fiery tongue I will give him a country and a century a limp and strong hands I will take his wife but give him a daughter lovely enough to break his heart and will send him across the sea where he will die an old man […]
A review of Evangelicals and Empire, edited by Bruce Benson and Peter Heltzel.
Further reflections on events in Iran and revolutions in general, with reference to Eastern Europe in 1989, Romanian films, and my pal Marek, who grew up on the other side of a once supposedly impregnable Iron Curtain.
Tangled Alphabets, an exhibit currently on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, brings together the works of visual artist contemporaries León Ferrari and Mira Schendel in their visual exploration of language.
For Buñuel, the absurdity of the world is only matched by those who attempt to redeem it by placing themselves in its context. It is this movement of the Church that Buñuel attempts to expose as a Dadaist banality, an undoing of the very thing it seeks to do. Nazarín is the parable of a Church caught up in the very system it is seeking to subvert, only to discover that it has itself been subverted by Orwell’s bootheel, Hitchen’s Missionary Position, the faceless horror of Camus’ prison.
The Secret Name of Cinema is Transformation Transform, transform anything everything — stairways into planets buttercups into navals icebergs into elephants — everywhere everything the old scene renewed by seeing the unseen seen anew transformed (James Broughton – Seeing the Light) A few days ago, the Boston Globe’s website released a series of stunning photographs […]
Criterion’s May release of Wise Blood (1979, John Huston) makes available the flawed but fascinating artistic meeting of two uncontested American masters, novelist Flannery O’Connor and film maker John Huston.
