Thus Spoke Bellavista

Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...

Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...

Aug 25, 2023 — Between 1960 and 1964, Roger Corman directed eight films loosely derived from Edgar Allan Poe and in all but one case starring Vincent Price: House of Usher (1960) was followed by The Pit and the Pendulum (1961); the omnibus feature...

Jan 18, 2023 — Names on the shelves this month include Terrence Malick, Vladimir Nabokov, Veronica Lake, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Sep 20, 2022 — The Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s strip-club-set drama is an intricate tapestry of grief and trauma, held together by a longing for human connection.

Sep 19, 2022 — Deeply influenced by his French education but primarily interested in the representation of African realities on-screen, this long-overlooked visionary approached a variety of subjects with a style both investigative and declarative.

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...

Jan 7, 2021 — That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is often referred to as Luis Buñuel’s “testament” work, the apotheosis of his remarkable career as a filmmaker. It perfectly blends the type of outrageous surrealism he pioneered in the late twenties and early...

Dec 1, 2020 — Near the end of the late Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee’s six-decade career in cinema, journalists liked to ask him one question quite frequently: Why did he never enter Bollywood?Depending on your vantage point, this query is either reasonable or ridiculous....