The Father

Dec 8, 2020 — Swiss-Moroccan filmmaker Halima Ouardiri’s short documentary Mutts is a captivating portrait of a shelter for stray dogs in Morocco, elegantly shot in a sunbaked color palette of rich golds and browns. The film, which makes its premiere on the Criterion Channel this week in...

Jul 25, 2019 — My first three films—Angela, Personal Velocity, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose—are all mysteries of female identity, how it can be warped, destroyed, or saved, particularly in the context of family and sexual love. These films are highly charged...

May 1, 2017 — Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 Rumble Fish captures rebellious youth in all its existential angst, following gang leader Rusty-James (Matt Dillon) as he navigates troubled relationships with his near-mythical older brother (Mickey Rourke), his on-and-off girlfriend (Diane Lane), and his drunkard...

Mar 2, 2017 — Repertory PicksThis Friday, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee will screen French Cancan, Jean Renoir’s vibrant reimagining of belle epoque Paris. Inspired by the life of Moulin Rouge founder Charles Zidler, this 1955 musical comedy tells the story of a cabaret impresario...

Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

Dec 29, 2015 — One refrain often heard in discussions of twenty-first-century film culture is a lament for the loss of social film viewing. While we celebrate the fact that digital technologies have given us convenient access to unprecedented numbers of movies, old and...

Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...

Aug 31, 2011 — Let there be no trouble, no pranks . . . Do you realize the enormity of our moral responsibility? —Headmaster in Zéro de conduite There is nothing in the history of movies that mirrors or matches the achievement of Jean...

Jun 6, 2011 — One Scene I lived in Zurich before joining Stanley Kubrick on his Napoleon project in 1969. Unfortunately, this film was never made, but I stayed with Stanley for another thirty years. It was in Zurich, in an art-house cinema, that...

Mar 15, 2011 — In Edward Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.