The New Land

Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...

May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.

Mar 23, 2010 — In myriad inventive ways, Terrence Malick’s philosophical drama shows us how nature and culture are always intertwined.

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...

Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...

Jul 14, 2009 — Tough title to live up to. The lofty three-word phrase Al Reinert chose for his 1989 documentary on the Apollo space program comes from the plaque the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left there in...

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...

May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton

Apr 24, 2000 — When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter. I have difficulty making contact with others, as one does when half-asleep. If a person is asleep...

Nov 18, 1997 — Erotic and antierotic, Crash the movie begins boldly enough with a vacantly lissome blonde (Deborah Kara Unger) dreamily opening her blouse to press a bare nipple against the enameled surface of an airplane fuselage before allowing a total stranger to...