Author Salvador Carrasco

The opening title card of La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) announces that this is “the first great Algerian film production”. This makes it technically an African film delv...

Some films are better served if we assess them in terms of their historical context, considering whatever the director’s intent might have been in making them, while others gain from taking them at face value, ...

The opening sequence of Cerrar los ojos (Close Your Eyes, Víctor Erice, 2023) made me feel like I was immersed in a Jorge Luis Borges story. Although not technically the case, this is befitting for a Spanish-Ar...

In its obituary for the sui generis director David Lynch (1946-2025), who recently gave up the ghost, The New York Times barely mentioned The Straight Story (David Lynch, 1999), a film that is more often than n...

Among the thousands of books that have been written trying to elucidate Hitler, there is a remarkable one by Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, that by the end of its comp...

To my daughter Cassandra Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readily available for the general public. If you were a well-estab...

Recently I saw what will most likely be my favourite film of the past year and foreseeable future, especially in light of the pandemic: The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul, 2019), from the Czech Republic. I made a...

Under the current restrictions of lockdown and quarantine, in which we are being asked not to leave our homes, “hands-on filmmaking” has become virtually impossible, at least in the sense of a group of people c...