Ever-present on those pesky “most disturbing movies” lists, Begotten almost became a victim of its own success. The film’s demiurge, God Killing Himself, adorns the…
Since I first reviewed Chronovisor in my Rotterdam coverage this past February, Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s feature debut has become a miniature sensation. Not…
Even when Jorge Luis Borges wrote screenplays, they weren’t necessarily “Borgesian” — not, that is, distilled into the particular pleasure of following one of Borges’…
Sympathetic portrayals of kids who’ve fallen into a life of crime have been commonplace in the arthouse circuit since at least the days of Italian…
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square is a place made out of dates. Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 —…
What a strange thing, the Olympics. In 1896, with the tools for globalization just barely on the horizon, the world (or, rather, Greece, leveraging its…
I have one weak spot in my cinephile repertoire: war films. I like to say that I’m curious about any form film can take, and…
Robert Zucchini — with a nom de plume that simultaneously signifies an Italian origin and mitigates any self-seriousness — loves Victor Hugo. He’s a writer,…
I’d promised myself to buy one book by a French author when perusing the tourist-heavy English language-friendly bookstores in Paris, and, while of course I…
Nowadays remembered as the independent producer of the heavy-hitters of the Japanese New Wave — Nagisa Ōshima; Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida; Shuji Terayama; all of…
Winter: the sun shyly hides behind a curtain of gray and makes its exit much earlier, but, when it does appear, it shines a special…
During my short self-directed crash course on Argentine cinema last month, I was surprised how little had been written in English on the subject. There…
First, on griots: these were the African Mande people’s historians, genealogists, poets, and court jesters. They were the official storytellers, and, as writers of their…
In 1974, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front (henceforth EAAJAF) followed in the footsteps of the Japanese Red Army by committing several terrorist acts in…
It’s nothing less than a miracle that restorations of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis’ criminally underseen Tras-os-Montes, Ana, and Rosa de Areia are making their…
“You tell me things I never found in Plato or Hegel.” Romantic expressions like this abound in Isiah Medina’s latest, Gangsterism, a film noir set…
In the 1960s, the genre that would become known in Japan as pinku eiga had just taken shape. This was a genre that dealt explicitly…
By 1919, 24-year-old Richard Barthelmess was already a star. He’d just played the leading man, albeit in yellow-face, in D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms opposite…
Those who have seen the Zürcher twins’ other works, The Strange Little Cat and The Girl and the Spider, may have felt a tension building…
In director Nicolás Pereda’s Copper, Lázaro (Pereda regular Lázaro Rodríguez) discovers a corpse by the side of the road. It’s unusual enough for him to…
Like many of you, I first discovered the French New Wave as a budding cinephile in high school. It was my introduction to how the…