Before we begin with the quarterly ranting, a quick clarification regarding last issue’s incendiary Cannes wrap-up. I fear that many readers might have missed the humorous undercurrent in the piece, one that, perhaps adventurously on my part, was written under the assumption that readers would have connected it to previous such Cannes wraps of varying…

By Dennis Lim It is perhaps redundant to call Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers a provocation. For starters, the title is meant literally. Korine’s fourth feature—his second after emerging from the widely documented downward spiral that nearly ended his career, and his first to be shot in his hometown of Nashville since his 1997 debut, Gummo—chronicles…

By Jonathan Rosenbaum 1871. A lavish 1990 period-piece about the rise and fall of the Paris Commune by Ken McMullen that I blush to admit I’d never heard of. This is included as a free supplement to the Summer 2009 issue of the English magazine Vertigo, and it comes with many intriguing extras, including the…

By Quintín In 1999, as a jury member for Antorchas, a now-defunct private foundation that awarded endowments for the arts and the sciences in Argentina, I was reading a huge pile of scripts from filmmakers applying for something like $10,000 US in funding. One of those scripts, written by one Mariano Llinás, was completely different…

By Henry K. Miller War was the first cause of modern British satire. In June 1959 Tom Lehrer, midway through a series of bookings in London, headed north to Cambridge to attend the first night of that year’s undergraduate revue, put on by the Footlights Club at the Arts Theatre. This was no ordinary student…

By Robert Koehler In the brave new world of films that have escaped from the categories of “narrative” and “documentary,” the matter at hand isn’t one of—to use another quotable word—“reality.” Indeed, the shattering of the simpler notions of reality is a crucial function of these films, since they’re in part expressions of doubt that…

By Adam Nayman “Family is a stab in the heart,” snarls Vincent Gallo as Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro. It’s a remark that cuts two ways: the blood that flows from the wound is both a sacrament and a damned spot. Despite their marked differences in age and temperament, there’s never any doubt that tetchy writer…