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The 2012 Mini-Poll
In the fifth consecutive installment of Ten Best Films'"Mini-Poll", the Tativille extended family's annual attempt to find some form of cinematic consensus for the year that was - by means of a...
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New Film: Django Unchained (2012)
One half of two thousand-twelve's most essential Hollywood double-feature along with Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012) pursues and provides the greater and...
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The Spectator as Filmmaker: Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008)
The film opens with the illustrated pages of Khosrow and Shirin, a story of Persian origins that the great epic poet Hakim Nezami Ganjavi pushed to its romantic apex in the twelfth century. After a...
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Every Howard Hawks Film Ranked
With submission coming of my completed dissertation, The Early Hawks: Howard Hawks and His Films, 1926-1936, I thought it only fitting to provide some form of commemoration in this space. Feeling the...
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Translation and Transposition in Abbas Kiarostami's Like Someone in Love (2012)
Like Someone in Love (2012) is a cinema of translation and transposition, of Iranian writer-director Abbas Kiarostami's rural, vehicular aesthetic into Tokyo's congested, neon-saturated present, and of...
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New Film: Beyond the Hills (2012)
Completely composed of shifting single-take set-ups that systematically substitute for an analytic breakdown of the bleak Carpathian landscape and barren convent interiors, Cristian Mungiu's...
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New Film: Spring Breakers (2012) & No (2012)
A floating miasma of fantasy and myth, Harmony Korine'sSpring Breakers (2012) follows four childhood friends, Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel...
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New Film: To the Wonder (2012)
A Romantic inquiry into love's eternal inconstancy and its coextensive capacity for redemption, American master Terrence Malick's sixth directorial feature, To the Wonder (2012), enumerates and...
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New Film: Pain & Gain (2013)
A stupendously captivating, admirably self-aware piece of attention-oriented action-hack cinema, Michael Bay's Pain & Gain (2013), from Christopher Markus and Steven McFeely's adaptation of Pete...
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Out of the Murky Depths: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's...
Abstracted from the oily murk and enveloping shadow of the swirling North Atlantic surf, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2012) is an accidental work of the avant-garde, an...
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The Best of Netflix Instant: Neighboring Sounds (2012)
Lost amid the clamor for the once great Arrested Development's poorly conceptualized streaming-service return - the first few character-focused episodes suggest the further quickening of Season 3's...
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Between Philia and Eros: Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha
In the third chapter of my dissertation, "The Dawn Patrol, the Group and Male Homo-sociality," I discuss friendship as a form of love (Philia), in relation to the pre-World War II films of Howard...
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New Film: Post Tenebras Lux (2012)
As writer-director Carlos Reygadas and cinematographer Alexis Zabé's camera rotates amid a closely huddled group of adolescent rugby players, in a cryptic coda that comes after a set of narratively...
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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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