White Material

Nov 24, 2009 — For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties...

Nov 22, 2009 — “The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump,” writes Naples native and best-selling Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano somewhere near the conclusion of his extraordinary 2006 “nonfiction novel” Gomorrah, a seethingly cogent and literarily constructed indictment of the...

Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...

Oct 12, 2009 — Man is Not a Bird: Flying Away The term “independent cinema” has lost its punch in recent years, from overuse and misapplication. One need only look to the films of Dušan Makavejev for a reminder of its true meaning. This...

Sep 22, 2009 — One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however,...

Mar 10, 2009 — Akira Kurosawa made Dodes’ka-den (1970) during the most crisis-laden period of his career. He had just spent two years embroiled in an ill-fated venture with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Japanese segments of the World War...

Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...

Aug 18, 2008 — One of the most awarded films in Japanese history, Keisuke Kinoshita’s nostalgia piece unfolds a celebration of family values and scenic beauty.

Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...