A closer look at Joseph Losey's 1963 film, which has just been given a 4K release by the Criterion Collection.
The latest on Blu-ray and DVD, including Annihilation, Gringo, Thoroughbreds, and Unsane.
A look at the entire career of Daniel Day-Lewis and how his work in "Phantom Thread" feels like the perfect finale.
Three acclaimed Chicago documentaries—"Life Itself," "Red Army," "Finding Vivian Maier"—are eligible for the Oscar shortlist.
Karen Black, who died Aug. 7 at 74, was the “what the hell?” emblem of the American New Wave, its most extreme, improvisational player, its most unusual, unaccountable, unstable presence.
Oh my. Here we go again with all the deathiness. Movie criticism keeps dying deader and deader. Film itself has keeled over and given up the ghost. Cinema ist kaput, and at the end of last month "movie culture" was pronounced almost as deceased as John Cleese's parrot. Ex-parrot, I mean. Then the movie "Looper" came out, posing questions like: "What if you could go back in time? Would you kill cinema?" Or something like that.
People, this dying has gotta stop.
Marie writes: remember "The Heretics Gate" by artist Doug Foster? Well he's been at it again, this time as part of an exhibit held by The Lazarides Gallery - which returned to the subterranean depths of The Old Vic Tunnels beneath Waterloo Station in London, to present a spectacular group show called The Minotaur. It ran October 11th - 25th, 2011 and depending upon your choice (price of admission) dining was included from top Michelin-star chefs.Each artist provided their own interpretation of the classical myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and as with The Heretics Gate before it, Cimera, Doug Foster's new and equally as memorizing piece made it possible to project whatever comes to mind onto it, as images of body forms and beast-like faces take shape and rise from the bowels of earth. (click image to enlarge.) Photo by S.Butterfly.
Click above to REALLY enlarge...
UPDATED 01/28/10: 2:25 p.m. PST -- COMPLETED!: Thanks for all the detective work -- and special thanks to Christopher Stangl and Srikanth Srinivasan himself for their comprehensive efforts at filling the last few holes! Now I have to go read about who some of these experimental filmmakers are. I did find some Craig Baldwin movies on Netflix, actually...
Srikanth Srinivasan of Bangalore writes one of the most impressive movie blogs on the web: The Seventh Art. I don't remember how I happened upon it last week, but wow am I glad I did. Dig into his exploration of connections between Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and Jean-Luc Godard's "History of Cinema." Or check out his piece on James Benning's 1986 "Landscape Suicide." There's a lot to look through, divided into sections for Hollywood and World Cinema.
In the section called "The Cinemaniac... I found the above collage (mosaic?) of mostly-famous faces belonging to film directors, which Srikanth says he assembled from thumbnails at Senses of Cinema. Many of them looked quite familiar to me, and if I'm not mistaken they were among the biographical portraits we used in the multimedia CD-ROM movie encyclopedia Microsoft Cinemania, which I edited from 1994 to 1998, first on disc, then also on the web. (Anybody with a copy of Cinemania able to confirm that? My Mac copy of Cinemania97 won't run on Snow Leopard.)
TORONTO -- Shirley MacLaine hadn't made a film for almost five years, not since she won the Oscar for "Terms of Endearment," and so when the role of the old piano teacher came along, maybe her first thought was to take a pass. She would have to play old and look old, and be just as stubborn at the end of the movie as she was at the beginning. Was this trip necessary?
LOS ANGELES -- On those few occasions when a dream does come true, its reality can look like this:
"You don't know me," said the great-looking blonde in the wraparound fur, "but I know you."
The kinds of films he likes to make are just the ones the studios are most wary about, John Schlesinger was complaining. And so he spends too much time turning down nice, tidy commercial subjects and trying to get, his latest dreams off the ground. He's made three movies in the last six years, and each one has borne the stamp of his temperament and successfully dealt with unlikely subject matter.
Did I see that TV documentary about John Ford? Yeah, I saw it." Peter Bogdanovich looked slightly nauseated. "Did I ever see it! Say I disliked it very much. No. Say I loathed it."
A fourth viewing of "Medium Cool" convinces me more than ever that this is a great American document, one of the most important films of this political and social period. It's also evident, this time around, that "Medium Cool" succeeds in different ways than most movies; that, indeed, it is weakest on its conventional levels.
With the lithe grace of a seasoned athlete, Peter Finch lifted the tea bag from the teapot and, holding it by the trademark at the end of its string, dropped it into an ashtray. His aim was accurate, and he permitted himself a dour smile.