Lost: Akira Kurosawa Noir
“In Kurosawa’s noir films, characters struggle to move beyond loss — personal, financial and national — only to find that more loss awaits them.”
Avenging the Destruction of True Love: François Truffaut’s ‘The Bride Wore Black’
“In ‘The Bride Wore Black,’ cruel fate rips true love away from the innocent, suggesting that Truffaut believed pure happiness is only found in fairy tales.”
The Crashing of the Wave: ‘Six in Paris’
“Despite being an uneven grouping hardly representative of the best these filmmakers had to offer, ‘Six in Paris’ is an interesting capsule of moments in time and space.”
The Modern Netherworld of Akira Kurosawa’s ‘The Bad Sleep Well’
“Kurosawa was rarely more bitter and dejected than he is here, crafting a sprawling noir tragedy from Shakespeare’s text, grappling desperately with identity in the nightmare of faceless modernity.”
The Banality of Xenophobia in R.W. Fassbinder’s ‘Katzelmacher’
“The virility of the unwanted foreigner is a typical focal point for the average xenophobe.”
World Cinema Project: Permanent Impermanence — ‘Pixote’ and ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’
“‘Memories of Underdevelopment’ shares with ‘Pixote’ a cautious destabilization, a sense of how long can this last, of tipping points, radical reform and the capricious aftermath.”
Dreams and Horrors in Bohemia: ‘Marketa Lazarová’ and ‘Valerie and Her Week of Wonders’
“As much as I love a good story, the best movies always transport me, in an intangible sense, through the base elements.”
‘Black Peter’ and the Wayward Path to Manhood
“As a character study, Miloš Forman’s feature directorial debut presents a realistic vision of a boy’s attempt to come of age; a path full of setbacks without a tidy resolution.”
Tearing Down the Monument: Sean Connery’s 1970s
“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
World Cinema Project: Behind Closed Doors – ‘The Housemaid’ and ‘Insiang’
“One of the great joys in viewing the films amassed under the World Cinema Project banner is discovering the richness of a nation’s cultural and scenic backdrop.”
Why Criticism: Nichols / Soderbergh
“In their conversations, Soderbergh and Nichols work together to dismantle the artificial dividing line between art and criticism, neatly moving between the two…”
Not the End: Celebrating the Directing Career of John Cassavetes
“Cassavetes’ films form a mosaic of artistic fortitude, glued together with thought.”
Alike in Their Way: (Un)happy Families in ‘Teorema’ and ‘Visitor Q’
“While ‘Teorema’ and ‘Visitor Q’ share a common DNA, what’s most striking is the way each film uses The Stranger. Both figures bring with them a kind of new order, as if they were missing puzzle pieces for the families that they integrate themselves into.”
Joy in the City: On Jacques Tati’s ‘PlayTime’
“It’s not difficult to see how PlayTime’s jubilant finale — with its invocation to fashion the city to its occupants’ sense of fun, desires and needs — is perhaps Tati’s most profound statement of his participatory cinema.”
Money Is the Game: The Strange Journey of ‘The Magic Christian’
“‘The Magic Christian’ cries out to be re-visited. For all the cultural specificity of the novel and film, Grand remains a strikingly modern figure.”
World Cinema Project: Persistence of Vision – ‘Dry Summer’ & ‘Law of the Border’
“‘Dry Summer’ and ‘Law of the Border’ remain available as fascinating, engaging documents of a national cinema often forgotten.”
‘A Woman Is a Woman’: Falling in Love with Karina, Godard and the Wave
“It is Karina who embodied the freedom, fascination and the unpredictability that would define the French New Wave. It is Karina who made so many fall in love — with her and with cinema as an extraordinary, exultant medium.”
Interview: Director Noah Lerner on Murray Lerner’s ‘Festival’
Bill Bria Interviews Noah Lerner About Murray Lerner’s 1967 Documentary Festival!
Things Go Wrong: Tony Hancock’s Cinema of Despair
“The Hancock persona tapped into a uniquely British strain of malaise, which manifests itself in a fractious fatalism, a dread of impotence which finds its expression in outlandish displays of petulance, pettiness and pomposity.”
I Sing for Myself: Renée and Judy on Judy Garland
“Judy the Actress and Judy the Icon may have been one in the same after all.”