By Mark Peranson In a subconscious sense, the impassioned cris de coeur that rippled through the internet following the shocking, but not surprising, dismissal of J. Hoberman from his position as senior film critic for the Village Voice on January 4, 2012, are evidence of Read more →
By Chuck Stephens Every film Bruce Baillie makes is a folk song he’s hearing in his head. The exquisite Valentin de las Sierras, Baillie’s ten-minute 1967 masterpiece—one of a series of extraordinary films (Quixote, 1965; Castro Street, 1966; Quick Billy, 1970) he made during the Read more →
By Albert Serra For China, Zhao Liang is the poet of justice. All his works deal, directly or indirectly, with this topic with a distinctive gentleness. The demagogic, the obvious, and the commonplace don’t exist for him. Be it through the use of violence (the Read more →
By Chris Fujiwara If there is a science-fiction element in Wang Bing’s work, an attempt to imagine unimaginable (though real) conditions for human life, there is also a war-movie element, a working-over of the terrain, together with the becoming-mineral of humanity that recalls the hard-bitten, Read more →
By Mark Peranson “The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant Read more →
By Raya Martin There is much to be said about Carlos Reygadas—the way he shoots his lifeless sex scenes as class discourse, or the way he embraces his characters as milieus, and vice versa—but his greatest weapon is not his ability to achieve technical prowess Read more →
By Jason McBride I’ve seen each of Kelly Reichardt’s feature films at least twice, but for some reason I can never really remember how they end. This despite the fact that they all end in roughly the same way: which is sort of not ending Read more →
By Antoine Thirion Discovering Raya Martin’s work inevitably went hand in hand with questions about his age. People were impressed that such a young director (he was born in Manila in 1984) hadn’t used short films as a simple springboard for features, but dared to Read more →
By Shelly Kraicer Pema Tseden himself considers it sad that only now, after one hundred years of cinema history, the first Tibetan filmmaker has emerged. But the first is already a master, with three brilliant features to date. Known also in Chinese as Wanma Caidan, Read more →
By Christoph Huber Long mainstream-despised as a videogame hack—although his case has been adopted by a handful of highbrow critics—Brit-born Paul W.S. is the elder, least pretentious, and most consistently amusing Anderson of the current director trifecta: its termite artisan. With the homegrown Newcastle juvenile-delinquent Read more →
By Johnny Ray Huston As I write this I’m listening to a new double-CD from San Francisco bootleg label Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God titled Polanski, Anger, Cocteau, T.V. Mikels, an entertaining collage of radio interviews that spotlights the filmmaker as implacable solo Read more →
By Adam Nayman Two men on fire: the burnt cranium of the title character in Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s new Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance unmistakably evokes the climax of their earlier Crank: High Voltage (2009). The spectacle of a brainpan in flames is Read more →
By Genevieve Yue The first film Michael Robinson made, at age 11, was a home-movie remake of Poltergeist, later repurposed into Carol Anne Is Dead (1992/2008). In both, Robinson’s sister presses her palms to the glass of a television monitor, its screen glowing with static. Read more →
By Aaron Cutler A young man guides a few people through a large, white, empty apartment. The room stretches wide from one bare wall to another. It’s morning on a hot day, and dust hangs in the air. The man, João (Gustavo Jahn), works leasing Read more →
By Kent Jones I have rarely been more surprised by a movie than I was by Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009). Most films that good come with some kind of buzz, and this one was undoubtedly no exception, but the buzz from Berlin had not Read more →
By Andréa Picard In praise of pockets—perhaps this is the essence of Liu Jiayin’s cinema to date. Like the handbags and dumplings whose real-time creation in her quietly astonishing diptych (soon to be a trilogy) of Oxhide (2005) and Oxhide II (2009) provide the films Read more →
By Tony Rayns Jia Zhangke wasn’t the first indie filmmaker in China, but he’s been way more influential than such predecessors as Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Wu Wenguang. Partly because his early films—Xiao Wu (1998), Platform, Unknown Pleasures (2002): the “Shanxi trilogy”—caught moments of Read more →
By Jonathan Rosenbaum Many reviewers of Azazel Jacobs’ four features understandably place them in a direct lineage from his father Ken’s work. Both filmmakers are clearly preoccupied with interactions and crossovers between fiction and nonfiction—although the same could be said of everyone from Lumière, Méliès, Read more →
By Olivier Père Born in 1973 in California but raised in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives, Harmony Korine has made at least three indisputable masterpieces of modern American cinema. The precocious scriptwriter for Larry Clark’s 1995 film Kids (with whom Korine worked again in 2002, Read more →
By Michael Sicinski Whereas almost all other music-video directors function in much the same capacity as graphic designers, Michel Gondry, by dint of an unyielding artisanal approach, has made a place for himself analogous to that of an architect. Like Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, Read more →
By Jay Kuehner There’s a certain poetic justice to the unxpected trajectory—provided by the 14th Buenos Aires Festival of Independent More →
By Aliza Ma The windows were all shaded and the sunlight could no more penetrate these dark rooms than the More →
By Adam Nayman **SO, SO MANY SPOILERS BELOW** It’s one thing to get a lesson in remedial spectatorship from a More →
By Michael Sicinski Is Terence Davies a radical conservative? Often one of the signs of a great artist is his More →
1. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) 2. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr) 3. L’Apollonide—Souvenirs de la More →
