
The Wandering Earth
I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' consummate attention to detail and infectious can-do…
I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' consummate attention to detail and infectious can-do…
Even though Fighting with My Family is undoubtedly about branding the WWE as a fantasy factory, its biggest strengths are its wit and surprisingly big…
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article commemorating the 2019 Chinese New Year, the Year of the Sow.
An article about START TV's My Start Story campaign.
An article commemorating the 2019 Chinese New Year, the Year of the Sow.
Scout Tafoya celebrates "Sweet Movie" in his latest video essay about maligned masterpieces.
Far-Flung Correspondent Gerardo Valero reflects on one of his favorite movies, The Poseidon Adventure.
A piece from a Far-Flung Correspondent on The Lion in Winter.
A tribute to Bruno Ganz.
An interview with rising filmmaker Alejandro Montoya Marín about his new film, Monday.
* This filmography is not intended to be a comprehensive list of this artist’s work. Instead it reflects the films this person has been involved with that have been reviewed on this site.
The astounding and virtually unclassifiable movie from Elaine May gets the Criterion treatment.
Scout Tafoya celebrates "Margaret" in his latest video essay about maligned masterpieces.
Let me indulge my passion for operatic drama for a moment and say that I've seen Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret" four times now (the theatrical version and the new "extended cut" on DVD, twice each) and, while I'm watching it, I feel like I've never before seen a movie that fully recognized what human behavior is like. Sure, the focus is entirely on a certain demographic slice of human beings -- mostly middle- to upper-class, educated, New York-dwelling, Judeo-Christian-atheist white people -- but these people are alive and ragged and messy in ways few movie characters are allowed to be. (The characters, and the lives the movie depicts, are messy; the movie itself is exquisitely shaped according to its maker's vision, and that was apparent from the theatrical cut.)
Of course, all movies are stylized and all characters, whether documentary subjects or fictional, are creations (of writers, directors, actors, editors, cinematographers and others) presented to us in a frame. Yet there are dimensions to the interactions in "Margaret" -- the longing to be understood, the perverse impulse to (deliberately?) misinterpret someone else, the desire to inflict emotional sabotage on yourself or another person just because you can -- that movies so often overlook in an effort to provide clear and clean drama in which everybody announces, bluntly and correctly, exactly what they mean to say.
In other words, as Lisa Cohen might say, "Margaret" calls bullshit on most other movies.