All About Me

Apr 20, 2012 — Cabbage soup for the soul.

Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...

May 22, 2011 — We received the sad news that Leonard Kastle, director of The Honeymoon Killers, passed away on Wednesday at his home in Westerlo, NY, at the age of eighty-two. In addition to writing and directing that film, Mr. Kastle was an...

Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...

Feb 22, 2011 — Andrea Arnold seemed to emerge out of nowhere with Red Road (2006), her revelatory, shrewdly observed debut feature about voyeurism and sexual revenge. That film won Arnold multiple awards, and she had already earned an Oscar for her short Wasp...

Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.

Sep 23, 2010 — I work closely on the Eclipse series, and one of the great privileges of that task is the chance to delve into the films and careers of artists I was previously only passingly acquainted with. Allan King is a supreme...

Feb 23, 2010 — Like many other French cinephiles, I discovered Make Way for Tomorrow relatively late, although we had been interested in Leo McCarey for years. We had hunted down his Laurel and Hardy pictures, adored Duck Soup, the best of the Marx...

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

May 20, 2009 — Early in Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder, the librarian Riichi distractedly peruses Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization while conversing with his clinging mistress, Yoshiko. One can read the reference in many ways: as a glancing jest, as an (uncharacteristic) Imamurian...