One and Eight

Dec 6, 2016 — Photo by Janet Pierson In the late eighties and early nineties, American independent film was coming into its own both artistically and commercially, and John Pierson was at the center of the movement. Once described by the New York Times...

Oct 4, 2016 — This account of a visit to the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set is excerpted from an issue of the University of California, Los Angeles, newspaper.

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Nov 12, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s politically prescient drama explores the tenuous, uneasy connections between inhabitants of a globally interwoven Europe.

Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...

Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...

Jan 26, 2015 — Scenes without endings, sounds without corresponding images, actions without seeming motivation—Lucrecia Martel’s sense-heightening debut offers a cinema of subtraction.

Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.

Oct 21, 2014 — There were plenty of advantages to living in Paris in the early 1970s, especially if one was a movie buff with time on one’s hands. The Parisian film world is relatively small, and simply being on the fringes of it...