Beyond the Mat

Jul 19, 2010 — “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?” A question followed by another question stands at the beating heart of The Red Shoes. It’s an entirely rhetorical exchange, but it underscores the power and the mystery...

Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...

Sep 22, 2009 — A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking—that’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film.

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.

Jun 25, 2007 — Taking the form of apocalyptic science fiction typical of the Cold War era, Chris Marker’s singular film is simultaneously a philosophical fiction, genre exercise, and treatise on cinematic time.

Feb 19, 2007 — A powerful document of anti-Nazi propaganda, Powell and Pressburger’s war drama consolidated their partnership and showed a way forward for British cinema.