To celebrate both the reelection of President Obama and the release of restored versions of the great filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's Trilogy of Life, I offer a poem, "Many Dreams: Or Persistence."
The Indiana Jones quartet on BluRay for the first time. Raiders looks better than it has, but is it possible this film needs a full restoration? I couldn't help thinking it should look even better throughout.
As many of you know by now, Chris Marker, the experimental filmmaker known for the groundbreaking sci-fi film, "La Jetee," passed away on his 91st bir...
After screening Criterion's new DVD set, "David Lean Directs Noel Coward," I resolved to compile my own top ten, "desert island" list of British films across the decades.
In a rare and masterful combination of old avant-garde film and contemporary classical music, "Voices of Light" will provide a new, sensual experience...
I googled "best summer-themed movies" but I think what I got was "any summer-themed movie."For those who want a little extra quality in their summer fare, here comes a varied but more rewarding list.
In the artistically vibrant NYC of the 50s, Cassel was an acting student with the famed Stella Adler when he encountered Cassavetes, just six years his senior, a man who'd go on to redefine what independent film could achieve and be.
Even though Entertainment Weekly named him the 16th-best film director of all time, if I mention the name Ernst Lubitsch to my own middle-aged contemporaries, I usually get a hazy look.
For those younger readers unfamiliar with him, how best to summarize this actor? Well, let's put it this way: in terms of authentic heartthrobs, before there was Johnny Depp, there was Alain Delon.
We should all periodically revisit the best books and films on the Holocaust, however unpleasant, to keep our own awareness, watchfulness, and revulsion very much alive. There is no shortage of worthy choices.
The late Deborah Kerr was the kind of star and personality we rarely see anymore: a lady first and foremost, who, even playing women of dubious virtue, projected an innate sense of class, dignity, even nobility.
We are so collectively mired in the hyper-superficial, materialistic, flashy "moment of now" that we haven't paused to acknowledge a man who helped bring some of the finest British films ever made to the screen.
Whether or not you personally love their work, it is difficult to dismiss the impact of the French New Wave. To reinforce this strongly held position, here is a pungent mix of Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer.
The riveting documentary The Man Who Skied Down Everest trails champion skier Yuichiro Miura and his team as they ascend the world's highest peak, hoping to descend on skis: a virtual suicide mission.
With time it was inevitable that the technological innovation called "Blu-ray" would impinge on my particular corner of the movie universe, and I would have to confront it, willingly or not.
Even as today's high school and college students are pushed harder in school, they cannot write an essay or use descriptive language nearly as fluently as their parents and grandparents could.
Technology will only offer more quality film choices as time goes by. The trick for savvy consumers and movie fans will be to stay informed as to what's really good..
This film sticks to its guns, audience expectations be damned, and delivers to the audience the most devastating depiction of the housewife's confined life in cinema.
Stone assembled a game cast to play the characters who've wrought destruction upon the world in these past seven years. Except for two or three, they are bland and vague versions of the real.