“Melville is God to me… [Le Samouraï is] the closest to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.” – John Woo Being and nothingness In a taut and lean 100 minutes Jean-Pierre Melville somehow manages to condense and distill 30 plus years of gangster movies, police procedurals, and film noir into an astonishing […]
Reviews
Pulling Focus: The Wild Bunch (1969)
“[The Wild Bunch] is what happens when outlaws go to Mexico.” – Sam Peckinpah If they move, kill ’em! Sam Peckinpah’s breakout picture is an outlaw epic that’s, in purely cinematic terms, a viciously graceful spectacle. With quick, startling cuts, slow motion splatter, multi-angle coverage, inventive sound design, superb cinematography and intricately arranged action […]
Pulling Focus: Morvern Callar (2002)
With Lynne Ramsay’s miraculous Morvern Callar we are continually someplace else. In the cinema, outside of the cinema, in and out of time, passionately and profoundly in the reality of experience and most certainly in tactile transcendency. A film of startling beauty and immense intellect, Morvern Callar may, for some viewers, bypass any immediate emotional […]
Pulling Focus: Love Streams (1984)
“Relationships were all [John Cassavetes] was interested in: the laughter and the games, the tears and the guilt, the whole roller coaster of love.” – Martin Scorsese At long last love To my mind there’s something mythic and altogether magical about Love Streams, John Cassavetes’ momentous and penultimate picture from 1984. For the past […]
Pulling Focus: Withnail and I (1987)
“The best British comedy ever made? Possibly. A masterpiece? Unquestionably.” – Ali Catterall, Film4 Where I’m calling from From the tender and impassioned sound of King Curtis’ live recorded cover of Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in the opening scene to the finishing drizzly goodbye by the wolf enclosure in Regent’s Park, […]
Pulling Focus: Dead Man (1995)
“[Dead Man] is the Western Andrei Tarkovsky wanted to make.” – J. Hoberman The Place of Dead Roads Ohio-born Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch refurbishes the black-and-white Western the way a 19th century Native American might see it––as a murderous and genocidal head trip heralding the deadly homecoming of capitalism. Woven into the light threads […]