Posts Tagged ‘Pulling Focus’
“[David Cronenberg] has been, film for film, the most audacious and challenging director in the English-speaking world.” – J. Hoberman Murder ballads Toronto, Canada’s most incendiary favorite son, director David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with a cinematic subgenre he essentially created––”body horror.” And certainly his deft psychological thriller from 2005, A History of Violence, presents no short supply of… Read more »
“[Brazil] is a film that bears watching again and again and again. It’s so packed with detail, it’s funny and so political. It’s just a perfect film I think.” – Ben Wheatley, director (Kill List, Free Fire) Somewhere in the twentieth century For American-born British filmmaker, animator, and comedian Terry Gilliam, the 1985 dystopian satire Brazil was his watershed…. Read more »
“In my book, Argento and Hitchcock master the threat of architecture and urban landscape like none other.” – Guillermo del Toro There will be blood The 1975 nightmare from giallo progenitor Dario Argento, Deep Red (Profondo Rosso in Italian, also released as The Hatchet Murders) is a high water mark for horror as well as being one of the… Read more »
“Annie Hall contains more intellectual wit and cultural references than any other movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture… no wonder it’s just about everyone’s favorite Woody Allen movie.” – Roger Ebert La-di-da, la-di-da, la la A commercial and critical hit, and winning four of the five Academy Awards it was nominated for––including Best Picture of 1978––Annie… Read more »
“[Deliverance] is the best film I’ve ever done. It’s a picture that just picks you up and sends you crashing against the rocks. You feel everything and just crawl out of the theater.” – Burt Reynolds Men without women Savagely compelled to defend themselves as the laws and measures of civilization no longer affect or protect them, Deliverance is… Read more »
“It is a sad and beautiful world.” – Roberto (played by Roberto Benigni) I fought the law and the law won Incidental encounters and tough luck reluctantly come together in writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s deeply distinctive third feature from 1986, Down By Law. Existing in its own even tempered and hermetically sealed cosmology, joyfully noncommercial and fancy free from the… Read more »
Being and time The oft antagonistic American indie filmmaker Todd Haynes first forced my attention with his 1995 revisionist art house horror film Safe, and I’ve been a supporter of his ever since. His sophomore film (following his impressive debut from 1991, Poison, and a string of exceptional short films), Safe is a masterpiece of existential catastrophe and coolly detached… Read more »
“There’s a strong case to be made for The Conversation being Coppola’s greatest film.” – Film4 Paranoia, the destroyer A bright, unclouded afternoon in San Francisco as a busy plaza teems with people in a sharply impressive telephoto shot as outlying music coalesces with electronic intonations. Tracking a circus mime through the bustling crowd before finding one Harry Caul… Read more »
“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” – Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (Groucho Marx) Animal Crackers, the second feature starring the Marx Brothers, released in 1930, is over eighty years old now, and it still leaves me hard-pressed to find many films that afford such amusement, banter, satire (high-society… Read more »
“On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my ‘back pain’, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because it’s awesome.” – Jordan Belfort… Read more »
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” – Lawrence Walsh (played by Joe Manetell) Darkness on the edge of town A neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown proves that director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, and producer Robert Evans can make a monumental film wherein they beat a genre until it’s a bloody, swollen, purple-bruised, and marred mess, then dump it in a reservoir… Read more »
“Cinema is showing more and more. It’s a paranoid, dictatorial cinema. And it’s saying less and less. We need a schizophrenic cinema.” – René Laloux And now we wonder where we are Will there ever be another full-length animated feature quite as wonderfully weird and endlessly imaginative as René Laloux’s underground French classic Fantastic Planet? Beset with warm pastel… Read more »
“Céline and Julie Go Boating is a do it yourself guide to rediscovering the delights of the street outside, and of the idiots all around you, here’s where we see Rivette first moving toward Shakespeare, and the world as all fools’ paradise.” – David Phelps Usually it began like this Playfully reflecting silent-era idiosyncrasy an on-screen title proclaims:“Usually it… Read more »
“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 existential tenor with Le Samouraï…. Read more »
“[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 scenes, Peckinpah and company utterly… Read more »
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 response as its protagonist is… Read more »
