Showing articles with label FILM. Show all articles
  • FILM

Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director

A rebellious Hollywood auteur's genius and self-destruction.

Read more...

  • FILM

America, America

A famed director's tribute to his family's immigrant odyssey.

Read more...

  • FILM

Cronos

Guillermo Del Toro's debut work is a wickedly inventive revision of one of horror's classic scenarios.

Read more...

  • film

The Complete History of American Film Criticism

A comprehensive, single-volume survey of American film criticism from the silent era to today, with ample excerpts. Read more...

  • film

Rock 'n' Roll High School

The unlikely charm offensive mounted by Roger Corman and the Ramones. Read more...

  • film

Summer Hours

The quiet power of a family drama might resist translation. Read more...

  • film

The Cannibal Film Genre

One of the most notorious episodes of the pioneering era offers a chance to consider the history of a perennial, if shadowy, film subject. Read more...

  • film

Kingdom of the Spiders

Shatner plus spiders equals a B-movie pleasure. Read more...

  • film

Nightwatching

A most painterly of filmmakers takes on the artist who has informed so much of his work. Read more...

  • FILM

Lola Montès

A circus beauty's tale is the heart of a masterwork that has left an enduring mark on filmmakers around the world. Read more...

  • film

The Exiles

Three young Native Americans leave the reservation and try to make their way in the wilderness of 1950s Los Angeles. Read more...

Objectified

In an age of disposable mass-production, a celebration of beauty in the aesthetics of everything from the toothpick to the iPhone. Read more...

The Dead

John Huston's directorial swan song glories in its sensitivity to its source in James Joyce's haunting story. Read more...

Death in the Garden

Luis Buñuel’s drama of survival and betrayed ideals shows the range of the director's filmmaking mastery. Read more...

Gomorra

A journalist's expose of Neapolitan organized crime is transformed into a cinematic portrayal of corrosive violence. Read more...

Farber on Film : The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber

Three and a half decades of a pathbreaking critic's work on film from Fuller to Fassbinder. Read more...

Z.

A thriller as effective in its stylish satire as it is transparent in its political sympathies. Read more...

Starting Point: 1979-1996

A new collection of essays by and interviews with famed anime creator Hayao Miyazaki. Read more...

The Human Condition

The mother of all war movies, Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition clocks in at almost ten hours and features an all-star Japanese cast... Read more...

The Last Days of Disco

That a movie with a get-happy soundtrack, a toothsome cast, a stockpile of zingers, and a gentle plotline should outfox popular tastesas demonstrated by its modest box office returns seems counterintuitive. Read more...

Berlin Alexanderplatz

What's 15 or so hours in front of the television screen when the director is the late bad boy of German cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-82), and the series is based on Alfred D”blin's great novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928)? The short answer is easy: it's some of the best time you will ever spend watching television in your life. Those familiar with D”blin's masterpiece know that his innovative novel, published between the two world wars, relies on an unusual narrative technique, combining alternate voices, multiple perspectives, and lots of found material. Street sounds, advertisements, radio headlines, popular songs: much like John Dos Passos' newsreel style in the U.S.A. trilogy, D”blin's montage mixes proletarian realism with Joycean modernism. No wonder D”blin's portrait of a working-class neighborhood in Weimar Berlin was a lifelong passion for Fassbinder, himself a cinematic poet of the underclass. It's amazing that producers were found for Fassbinder's ambitious project -- 13 episodes and an epilogue tracing the life of Franz Biberkopf (G�nter Lamprecht), a former transport worker and pimp who leaves prison (four years for killing his girlfriend in a crime of passion). Determined to go straight, the big lunk Biberkopf is overwhelmed by the street life and unemployment in a depressed city, the sights and sounds of which Fassbinder recreates with astonishing detail. And the faces! Using some of his regular troupe (Hanna Schygulla, Gottfried John, Brigitte Mira ), Fassbinder fills the cast of thieves, whores, and hustlers with a motley array straight from the sketchbooks of George Grosz. By the epilogue, a surreal descent into Franz's madness, we know that Fassbinder has made this work all his own -- the soundtrack includes (anachronistically) Elvis, Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed -- and the director himself pops up in an intriguing cameo. Not just a brilliant re-creation of a time and place and a novel, Fassbinder's epic brings together all his magnificent obsessions: with love and betrayal, sex and violence, politics and the individual. Here is German New Wave cinema at its raw and vertiginous best.
-

February 9: Alice Walker was born on this day in 1944. Thirty years after her Pulitzer winner The Color Purple, Walker continues to publish in many genres. Her most recent book is The Chicken Chronicles, a memoir-meditation…

Once held close to the chest and protected by well-understood laws, the valuable information about our lives that we blithely disclose with our every keystroke has the potential…

Books CDs, DVDs to know about now
Alice James

"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.

Midnight in Austenland

The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?

Humble Homes, Simple Shacks...

Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.