There Will Be Blood

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...

Casque d’or

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...

Anatomy of a Murder

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 Regained

“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...

Green Fish

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 ...

Irma Vep

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...

La ronde

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...

Commissar

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...
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Fury

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...
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State Legislature

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...