By Scott Foundas Literally speaking, the “somewhere” of Sofia Coppola’s newly minted Golden Lion winner is the Chateau Marmont—that hilltop monolith of celebrity decadence, modelled loosely on an 11th-century Loire Valley estate, staring down upon Sunset Boulevard along with the ghosts of the many (Garbo, Belushi, Dean) who lived, died, or at least partied hardy…

By Scott Foundas We’re all just playing our parts now. This was written long before we got here. —dialogue from Meek’s Cutoff “A road movie without the road” reads, in part, the tagline to Kelly Reichardt’s debut feature, River of Grass (1994), a screwball neo-Breathless about a bored housewife and a hapless momma’s boy on…

By Scott Foundas Like The Sound of Music without the music, Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch opens in a present-day convent, where the eponymous young novitiate—a girl of about 20—has run afoul of the mothers superior. She confuses abstinence with martyrdom, they say, as evidenced by her acts of starvation and self-mortification. And she has taken the…

By Scott Foundas There may have been no hotter ticket at this year’s Sundance Film Festival than the press screening of Deborah Kampmeier’s Hounddog. It was the kind of cavalcade of critics and “industry reporters” behaving badly—pushing, shoving, and clawing their way into an undersized hotel screening room while yelling death threats at harried publicists—which…

By Scott Foundas When a programmer from a prestigious fall film festival confided to me that he had passed on Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It sight unseen after a buyer in Cannes forewarned him that the movie was “too Japanese” to appeal to international audiences, I was hardly surprised. After all, by mid-way…

By Scott Foundas It’s been years since pro wrestler Randy “The Ram” Robinson (Mickey Rourke) left the big-arena circuit (or, rather, had it leave him) for hand-to-mouth bookings in high-school auditoriums and banquet halls. But he still can’t get the roar of the crowd out of his head, regardless of whether he has his hearing…

By Scott Foundas A couple of years ago, while serving on a jury at a small Italian film festival sponsored by an organization devoted to promoting “spiritual cinema,” I was asked by a couple of eager volunteers to name my favourite living Italian filmmakers. When I responded “Ermanno Olmi,” the choice was met with approving…