Bigger Than Life (1956) A Film by Nicholas Ray

Over the course of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life , everything that glows with joyousness, complacency, and success at the beginning of...

The Freethinker (Fritänkaren) A Film by Peter Watkins (1994)

If cinema is to survive as a democratic art form, one of its most crucial figures is the English filmmaker Peter Watkins, not because of any...

Screening Notes #12

The Conformist (1970): I'm not one to obsessively justify the psychological, thematic, or narrative roles of images in a film, but if T...

Cannes 2012 Round-Up

Below is a complete ranking of the films I saw at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Enjoy! 1. Holy Motors (Carax, France, In Competition) Whe...

Cannes 2012: A Virginal Diary

(I attended the Cannes Film Festival for the first time this year, resulting in my low output on this blog for the past two weeks. I will so...

Wuthering Heights (2011) A Film by Andrea Arnold

If there was any doubt of the emotional infantilism and redundancy of Andrea Arnold's new and fiercely independent update to the classic...

The Girlfriend Experience (2009) A Film by Steven Soderbergh

For a director who pays fastidious attention to the politics, social trends, industries, and technologies of his milieus, it's no small ...