The Master

Feb 25, 2020 — In these times of Trumpidation, thirty years after its auspicious release, Paris Is Burning seems even more relevant than it did in early 1991, when I wrote the following for Black Film Review about Jennie Livingston’s phenomenal documentary on New...

Jan 21, 2020 — Melancholy and offbeat, Anna Mantzaris’s stop-motion animated short Good Intentions tells the tale of a woman involved in a hit-and-run accident that sparks a chain of strange occurrences. Using chubby-cheeked felt puppets that might suggest a more charming, whimsical type of story,...

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

May 31, 2018 — Repertory Picks On Saturday evening, the Bay Area’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will play host to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, screening as part of the series Early Music on Film. (The two-week program is itself part of...

Dec 21, 2017 — This month, just in time for Halloween, two chilling tales are headed to the United Kingdom in their Criterion editions: Carnival of Souls, Herk Harvey’s macabre 1962 B-movie masterpiece, and The Lure, a boldly feminist mermaid musical from Polish director...

Apr 27, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis coming Sunday, the Honolulu Museum of Art will kick off a daylong tribute to Andrzej Wajda—who died last October at the age of ninety, and whose final feature, the artist biopic Afterimage, opens theatrically next month—with a screening...

Mar 31, 2017 — Like his famously enigmatic landscapes, the performances that anchor Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are integral to his vision of existentialist ennui. Among the most iconic is David Hemmings’s turn in the Italian master’s first English-language feature, Blow-Up, a psychological mystery that...

Mar 17, 2017 — A cornerstone of Taiwanese cinema, Edward Yang’s 1985 sophomore feature, Taipei Story, makes its U.S. theatrical premiere today at Brooklyn’s BAMcinématek. Screening in a new 4K restoration undertaken by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, this slow-burning portrait of urban...

Nov 25, 2016 — Did You See This? In celebration of TIFF’s ongoing series Imitations of Life: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Guy Maddin takes a look at the German master’s predilection for lush color palettes. In his latest TCM Diary for Film...

Jul 7, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, as part of its annual series the Auteurs, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is screening Ingmar Bergman’s 1949 film Thirst. Like many of the Swedish master’s early works, this rarely shown character...