Author John Fidler

Men die violently in There Will Be Blood (2007), Paul Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature film. They are impaled by the tools of the oil trade in late 19th and early 20thcentury America. And they are murdered. When...

Midway through Jacques Becker’s sparkling, multi-faceted Casque d’or (1952), a wise old woman watches lovers Marie (Simone Signoret) and Manda (Serge Reggiani) enjoy what they don’t know are their last blissful...

Originally published in Senses of Cinema Issue 56, August 2010 With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behi...

In an interview with his fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, Otto Preminger speaks of the influence of the law on his life and work. Preminger’s father was a District Attorney and Attorney General for the Austr...

“time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was – only is.” - William Faulkner, interview in The Paris Review, Spring 1956 T...

Lee Chang-dong’s wrenching, tonally nuanced first film, Chorok mulkogi (Green Fish, 1997), packs a quiet wallop. By turns emotionally coercive, visually subtle, and as ruthless as the ritual pummeling its main ...

In Billy Wilder’s hilariously acid The Fortune Cookie (1966), sports cameraman Harry Hinkle (Jack Lemmon) gets clobbered by football star Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson (Ron Rich) when Jackson is tackled along the ...

Towards the end of Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos, 2009) – his sad, playful, colour-saturated tribute to his own and so many others’ films – Harry Caine/Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) caresses...

With its rapid cuts, roaming camera, passel of characters (some of them so pitiful they seem always in need of a hug or maybe a swat on the behind), sense that chaos is only a phone call or knock of the door aw...

WALDO PEPPER : Do you like movies? MARY BETH : Mmm-hmmm. – The Great Waldo Pepper (George Roy Hill, 1975) … perhaps one must become the films one loves. – Murray Pomerance (1) A moment in Psycho (1960), Al...

A recent roundup of prostitutes in a small town yielded a collection of mug shots of the women of the night. Looking at these empty, grey faces staring blindly into the same kind of camera that departments of t...

The only male soldier in Aleksandr Askoldov’s Commissar who shows up ready for a fight as the Russian Civil War lurches on is a child. The opening scenes of this monumental film are chock-a-block with bedraggle...

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas…” Too sentimental! – Boris (Woody Allen), as he throws out one of his poems (which is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of ...

A new article to coincide with screenings at the Australian Centre For the Moving Image in Melbourne.

Fury (1936 US 92 mins) Prod Co: MGM Prod: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Dir: Fritz Lang Scr: Bartlett Cormack, Fritz Lang, from the story “Mob Rule” by Norman Krasna Phot: Joseph Ruttenberg Ed: Frank Sullivan Art...

A vehicle crawls along a road that cuts across a brown and dusty landscape, where an African-American youngster tends an ailing horse. Three shiftless white men gather on a porch, talking of wasting time, waiti...

State Legislature (2006 USA 217 mins) Prod Co: Zipporah Films, Inc. Prod, Dir, Ed, Sound: Frederick Wiseman Phot: John Davey Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky L...

The critic must have two things: personality and an ax to grind. – Eric Bentley, critic and playwright (1) In his review of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) in The Nation – an American magazine of political ...

WILLIE (eating a TV dinner): Eva, stop bugging me, will you? You know, this is the way we eat in America. I got my meat, I got my potatoes, I got my vegetables, I got my dessert, and I don't even have to wash ...

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, ...