Don Siegel’s superior crime picture Charley Varrick (1973) was supposed to be called Last of the Independents, but that title was nixed by Universal honcho Lew Wasserman. This probably gives even more credence to the subversive, stick-it-to-the-system notion nestled inside this tale of a crop-duster pilot who has resorted to small-scale robbery for a living because he can no longer compete against the capitalist monopoly in his legal job. 

It’s not as if Elaine May wasn’t a beloved figure in American popular culture for most of her life. Her successful pairing with Mike Nichols as an innovative improv comedy team in the late ’50s may have been short-lived—the duo broke up at the height of their success in 1961—but is regularly cited as one of the most influential and well-remembered comedy acts the US has ever known.

Everybody is staring into the sky, wearing special glasses or holding up black strips to protect their eyes. She stops at a park, joining a small group of people, putting on her sunglasses. Dogs bark as the light dims—they are awaiting a solar eclipse. “Not just dogs, every animal is afraid,” a man explains to his kid. “Even our ancestors, a long time ago, feared the eclipse.” His wife adds, “They thought the disappearance of the sun meant the end of the world.”

The pear of anguish is a medieval torture instrument, whose spoon-like metal segments spread at the turn of a screw in its centre. Also known as the “choke pear” because it was often applied to the victim’s mouth, it could be inserted into any orifice.

Peter Tscherkassky’s 20-minute film Train Again unearths some new materialist marvels while expanding on those typically Tscherkasskian sensations the Austrian filmmaker achieves through the technique of contact printing, in which found footage is copied by hand, frame by frame, onto unexposed film stock.

By Christoph Huber Published in Cinema Scope #88 (Fall 2021) I Peter Tscherkassky’s 20-minute film Train Again unearths some new materialist marvels while expanding on those typically Tscherkasskian sensations the Austrian filmmaker achieves through the technique of contact printing, in which found footage is copied by hand, frame by frame, onto unexposed film stock. His…

The two most cherished film books in the pile on my bedside table are in a language my command of which is rudimentary at best. But since both Jacques Lourcelles’ Dictionnaire du Cinéma – Les Films as well as Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Bertrand Tavernier’s 50 ans de cinéma américain have never been translated from French into either English or German, I gladly make do, filling the gaps with a mixture of autodidactic guesswork and occasional dictionary consultation, which for all its drawbacks has proved to be a viable method.

By Christoph Huber  “I should have been born a hundred years earlier when not having a style was a style.”—Burt Reynolds in Gator (1976) The passing of Burt Reynolds this September at age 82 from cardiac arrest drew a lot of attention, but once again relegated to a footnote what I consider his most remarkable…

By Christoph Huber “This fight will not end in terrorism and violence. It will not end in a nuclear holocaust. It begins in the celebration of the rites of alchemy. The transformation of shit into gold. The illumination of dark chaotic night into light. This is the time of sweet, sweet change for us all.”…

By Christoph Huber It could have been another quiet day in the country, but it wasn’t meant to be: Shiota Akihiko’s Wet Woman in the Wind starts with an idyllic shot of a forest glade dappled with sunlight, the only hint at the absurd convolutions to come being a chair positioned incongruously at the edge…

By Christoph Huber “Jason makes everything better.”—Paul Feig, quoted in Esquire’s 2015 Statham cover story It’s difficult to think that we should be grateful to Guy Ritchie for anything, but I guess he deserves credit for casting Jason Statham in his debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). Statham has since gone on to…

  By Christoph Huber Don’t be fooled by the inane Haneke comparisons lavished by lazy critics on the first fiction feature by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who previously made the beautiful portrait-essay Kern and the underseen drinking-game short Dreh und Trink (full disclosure: they are also my best friends, but that’s not why I…

By Christoph Huber “The theatre is not a classroom, so there is nothing to learn. But there is a lot to see,” Michael Glawogger quipped at the Flaherty seminar in 2010—just one of many choice aphorisms given (not just) on that occasion, demonstrating several of the unique gifts of this one-of-a-kind Austrian director. He not…

From Cinema Scope #55, Summer 2013 By Christoph Huber The eventual Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Panh’s The Missing Picture parts with the formal orthodoxy of his previous films on the subject like S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) or Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), for the first time using both found…

By Christoph Huber Daily reporters at film festivals dread few demands from otherwise uninterested editors as much as “the festival’s overarching theme”: along with weather reports, these requests crop up with dispiriting regularity. As if a limited selection of movies (circumscribed by all kinds of necessities and strategic manoeuvers, at times more than artistic merit,…

By Christoph Huber Besting Bille August by a year, it has taken Austrian director Michael Haneke only four to join what we cynical film critics like to call the Emir club: the allegedly prestigious circle of two-time Palme d’Or winners, hitherto occupied only by Kusturica (1985, 1995), August (1988, 1992), and the Dardennes (1999, 2005).…

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 story Shopping (1994), he delivered a stylish calling card and…

By Christoph Huber Programmed in typical Cannes fashion as almost overlapping screenings, the double feature consisting of the press show of Miike Takashi’s competition entry Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and the sole Quinzaine “special screening” of Sono Sion’s Guilty of Romance made for an instructive lesson in festival reception. On the most superficial level,…