Metropolitan (1990) A Film by Whit Stillman

One could imagine even Luis Buñuel, the famously scathing critic of the bourgeoisie, warming up to Whit Stillman's wry, patient debut Me...

Screening Notes #10

Luck (Episode 1 and 2) (2012): A beautiful case study of why I do not watch episodic dramatic television much is Luck , a new HBO horse-rac...

David Gatten's Secret History of the Dividing Line

In a cinematic culture where words, whether onscreen or via narration, are commonly ghettoized as paltry emotional shorthand and "visua...

My Night at Maud's (1969) A Film by Eric Rohmer

My Night at Maud's is simultaneously one of the most accessible and thorniest of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, exploring as it doe...

I Fell Silent (Shameless Self-Promotion)

For those readers who are unaware (which is probably all of you), I'm a filmmaker as well as a critic. I've made a whole bunch of sh...

L'Argent (1983) A Film by Robert Bresson

Boiled down to its essential actions, Robert Bresson's final film L'Argent might just resemble a bunch of people opening and closin...

The Grey (2012) A Film by Joe Carnahan

From the moment its grimy, grainy, workmanlike opening shots of a mopey Liam Neeson trudging around a hellish Alaskan oil reserve tarnish th...

Silent Souls (2010) A Film by Aleksei Fedorchenko

In its opening sequence of lovely, elegiac imagery and reflective voice-over, Aleksei Fedorchenko's Silent Souls succinctly evokes its ...