The Base

Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...

Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...

Feb 13, 2006 — John Ford’s biographical drama portrays an imaginary antebellum America with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm while sustaining an underlying note of somber apprehension.

Jan 29, 2001 — Invisible monsters suck out your brains! And that’s just for starters.

Sep 6, 1999 — The subject of loneliness and the observation of the isolated person has always interested me. Even as a child, I couldn’t help but notice those who didn’t fit in for one reason or another—myself included. In life, and for my...

Jul 21, 1998 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy, of which this release is the first part, was adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa’s epic novel Musashi Miyamoto, which has been called Japan’s Gone with the Wind. The comparison is valid, for the tale of the medieval...

May 5, 1998 — For many years now, one legendary film has appeared on every list of fine movies that are missing from distribution and home video. That film is Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, the 1971 drama about a fourteen-year-old girl and her little brother,...

Mar 21, 2024 — Molly Manning Walker is a writer, director, and cinematographer based in London. How to Have Sex, the first feature film she has written and directed, won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Her work as...

Aug 9, 2021 — Edson Oda is a Japanese Brazilian writer-director based in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of São Paulo with a bachelor’s degree in advertising and completed his Master of Fine Arts in film and production at the University of...

Jun 27, 2018 — Austin-based duo David and Nathan Zellner are the directors of the new film Damsel. They have also worked together on the films Kid-Thing (2012) and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014). Their selections below are listed in no particular order.