The Heart

Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.

Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.

Oct 16, 2012 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is one of the most sensual films ever made—and there are hardly any people in it. In this poetic documentary—available to stream for free this week on Hulu as part of our Cityscapes festival—the Japanese avant-gardist responsible for the...

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Aug 27, 2012 — There are disturbing movie scenes, and then there are disturbing movie scenes. The following, from Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, is not for the faint of heart. The 1970 film is the ultimate example of Mailer’s cinematic philosophy, which held that a...

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.

Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japa­nese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...