Incompreso

Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.

Nov 8, 2011 — With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully painted backdrop. We...

Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.

Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...

Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....

Apr 26, 2011 — At once prestigious literary adaptation and slap­stick buddy flick, this is something like a lowbrow art film, an egghead monster movie, a hilarious paean to reckless indulgence, and perhaps the most widely released midnight movie ever made.

Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

This Japanese visionary played chaos like jazz in his movies, which included anything-goes yakuza thrillers and daring postwar dramas of human frailty.

Nov 13, 2009 — Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who made the utterly bonkers 1977 kinda-horror film House, currently getting a first-time American theatrical run from Janus Films, is profiled by Paul Roquet in a new essay for Midnight Eye. One of the few pieces...