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New Film: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet / Vous n'avez encore rien vu (2012)
Seated in a marble-walled home cinema adorned with rows of plush black couches and over-sized armchairs, twelve French actors, each identified by his or her real name in a previous series of phone...
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New Film: Before Midnight (2013)
The consensus selection for the best new film of 2013, six months in, Richard Linklater's Before Midnight conceivably brings one of the recent screen's richest franchises, such as it is, to a...
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Le grand amour: The Erotic Imagination of Pierre Étaix
Staged, in often voiced-over vaudevillian silence, as a series of recollections, desires and contingent realities that collectively map the mental geography of actor-director Pierre Étaix's middle-aged...
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New Film: The Hunt & Drug War
A Kafkaesque scenario of the agonizing injustices inflicted upon a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of child sex abuse, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt (Jagten, 2012), from a screenplay by Tobias...
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New Film: The Grandmaster (2013)
The first evidence or rather confirmation to reach the United States that two thousand thirteen belongs foremost to the world-class masters of the Sinophone cinema, Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster (Yi...
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Previewing The 36th Starz Denver Film Festival
Since mid-July, the overwhelming majority of my film-viewing has been devoted to next month's Starz Denver Film Festival, first in previewing nearly forty festival submissions, and consequently in...
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36th Starz Denver Film Festival: A Touch of Sin (2013)
Conceived as an oblique, 21st-century take on the wuxia (literally "martial hero") film, where that genre’s perpetual rendering of motion is transformed and displaced onto China’s exceedingly mobile,...
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36th Starz Denver Film Festival Report Card
Borgman(Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands, 2013, 118 min.)Jan Bijoviet and his band of anarchic wood sprites enter the lives of a middle class family like a force of nature leaving chaos and destruction...
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Previewing the Directory of World Cinema: Belgium: The Broken Circle...
The Broken Circle BreakdownStudio/Distributor: Menuet Producties, Topkapi Films/Kinepolis Film Distribution, Wild Bunch, Tribeca FilmDirector: Felix Van GroeningenProducer: Dirk ImpensScreenwriter:...
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36th Starz Denver Film Festival: The Great Beauty (2013)
Populated by the debauched, disenchanted or simply disinterested elite of Roman society – that is, by a decadent and fading aristocracy, counterfeit art-world celebrities, and endlessly prattling...
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"I like these Anglo-Saxons": In Consideration and Great Appreciation of...
Bowing at Radio City Music Hall in July 1933, an apt setting for the New York premiere of RKO's radio-sponsorship send-up, Professional Sweetheart, director William A. Seiter's early Ginger Rogers...
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New Film: Stray Dogs & 12 Years a Slave
Following the Berlin and Cannes premieres of Wong Kar-wai's The Grandmaster (2013) and Jia Zhang-ke's A Touch of Sin (2013) respectively, films that in both instances conceivably merit the title of...
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Twenty-thirteen - Better by the Help of a Good Epilogue: Matías Piñeiro's...
Taking its title from the gender masquerading protagonist of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and borrowing story-lines and snatches of dialogue from both the aforesaid and also the playwright's As...
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The Best Films of 2013
1. The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-wai)2. The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino)3. Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012; pictured)4. Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012)5. Post Tenebras Lux...
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The Best Films of 2013
The Twenty Best New Films of 2013:1. A Touch of Sin(Jia Zhangke)2. The Grandmaster(Wong Kar-wai; pictured)3. Leviathan(Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012)4. Stray Dogs(Tsai Ming-liang)5....
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Too Poor and Too Rich: Little Man, What Now? (1934) & The Wolf of Wall Street...
Premiering finally on home video last October as part of TCM's Universal Vault Series, Little Man, What Now?(1934, Universal) provides even further evidence of the extraordinary emotional richness and...
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Iranian Oscar-Submission Supplement: The Past (2013) & The Cycle (1977)
Anointed Iran's submission for the 86th Academy Awards, following its fêting for 'Best Actress' at last year's Cannes Film Festival - it failed not only to receive a 'Best Foreign-language' nomination,...
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January In Review (feat. Spike Jonze's Her)
Always a welcome relief from the rigors and assumed responsibilities of year-end list-making season, January is that month, at least for this academic critic, where things get back to normal, where my...
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New Film: Like Father, Like Son (2013)
Reaffirming its writer-director as one of the contemporary screen's most effective makers of sentimental, family-centered melodrama, to damn with faint praise in any context other than the filmmaker's...
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"How bored, how doleful is the flesh!": Jeremi Szaniawski on Nymph()maniac...
The impetuous and darkly facetious Lars von Trier is back with a two-in-one hat-trick,Nymph()maniac(2014). It tells the story of Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a self-professed nymphomaniac who embarks...
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New Film: Stranger by the Lake / L'Inconnu du lac (2013)
Distributed by Les Films du Losange, the French production company most associated with the films of its co-founder Éric Rohmer, Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake(L'Inconnu du lac, 2013) draws on...
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February/March In Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Missing Picture,...
At the end of January, I wrote of the relief that comes with the new year, with no longer having to submit oneself to the responsibilities of list-making and being able, finally, to find some balance...
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New Film: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
With its opening, starry nocturnal sky bleeding into an overhead set-up of a revolving turntable, Jim Jarmusch's vampiric opus Only Lovers Left Alive(2013) wastes little time in (analogically) tipping...
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New Film: The Immigrant (2013)
Representing the absolute pinnacle of American prestige filmmaking in twenty-thirteen - even as it would be all but discarded by its Weinstein Co. distributor in a profoundly unheralded spring 2014...
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Goodbye Tativille, Hello OKCMOA Film Blog
After nine years and three hundred ninety posts, Tativillewill be going on permanent hiatus. Let me extend my sincerest thanks to my exceptionally loyal readership, and my gratitude to the many of you...
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