Two to One

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Aug 30, 2009 — There’s more to cooking on camera than Top Chef, and despite films like Big Night or Julie and Julia that have inspired foodies across the country to run out and prepare elaborate meals, it’s rare that we get a cinematic...

Apr 19, 2009 — Big and Little Edie fans have been coming in droves to take advantage of our Grey Gardens $5-off sale. To such an extent, indeed, that we’ve temporarily sold out of our two-disc box set, including both the original film and...

Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...

May 19, 2008 — Top fashion models bleeding from sharp-edged aluminum dresses. A comic-strip American superhero oozing stigmata. A naked couple electrically zapped for the delectation of the TV-viewing public. These are some of the images from the fiction films of American expatriate in...

May 12, 2008 — If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet, the star of Louis Malle’s staggering psychological drama.

Oct 22, 2007 — Through the alcohol-induced convulsive movements of Firmin, a fallen diplomat, John Huston puts what is perhaps his own fear of decline, of departure without making peace with one’s loved ones, on the screen.

Dec 21, 2006 — It’s the season when a lot of things arrive on five. Yesterday Tony, who does authoring for us, brought in gorgeously authored doughnuts from the Doughnut Plant on Grand Street, in flavors like marzipan and pomegranate jelly. John Gudelj, our...

Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...

May 22, 2006 — Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is a virtual hub of urgent themes, formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America.