This is the first of a series of posts that will commemorate the decade that was (or will soon be was!?). Each few days I will name my choices for the best films of each particular year in the aforementioned decade that will soon be a was. This will culminate just after the new year with my list of the 50 greatest films of the decade. So without further ado I give you the year 2000. 1. In the Mood...
Just as they did ten years ago , James Quandt and TIFF Cinematheque ( née Cinematheque Ontario) have conducted a worldwide poll of film curators, archivists, historians and programmers for best ("most important") films of the decade (scroll down for the compiled list). It's a heady and wonderful list that militates unashamedly and polemically for film as art . There are 54 films on...
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century has been named the best film of the decade in a critics poll by the Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque . The movie that was censored in Thailand continues to be hailed by critics worldwide. In fact, three of Apichatpong's films are on the list. His 2004 Cannes Jury Prize-winning drama Tropical Malady is at No. 6, and 2003's Cannes Un...
Robert here. As Nathaniel looks back at 2001 , I feel myself wanting to throw in some praise for the best opening scene of the year. An eclipse is coming and the drunks at the town bar enlist the help of village idiot Valuska to explain it to them. You see, Valuska understands things. And those things that he doesn't understand he finds fascinating and magical. In the world of director Béla...
The past ten years have not been the strongest internationally in the history of the art form. Certainly, as with the previous, vaunted decade-and-a-half, wherein notably Iran and the new cinemas of the Chinese world emerged, vital and compelling art has come from unexpected places: in the present decade, Argentina, Germany, Romania and Southeast Asia have all developed into new epicenters of the medium....
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) .. Jacques Rivette Gertrud (1964) .. Carl Theodor Dreyer The Green Ray (1986) .. Eric Rohmer Chimes at Midnight (1965) .. Orson Welles Early Summer (1951) .. Yasujiro Ozu Late Spring (1949) .. Yasujiro Ozu Sans Soleil (1983) .. Chris Marker L'Atalante (1934) .. Jean Vigo The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) .. Victor Erice Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) .. Robert Bresson...
by Carson McCullers The setting of “The Ballad of the Sad Café” is as much canvas as it is character, providing a fitting milieu of mud and mosquitoes for its dismal dissections of ruptured love and obsession. Carson McCullers, who burst onto the literary scene at twenty-three as something of a prodigy with her first novel “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” is a gifted stylist...
It’s been a bit of a monster-fest around here lately. I promise to write something about Bela Tarr, and a piece on Shinoda’s Double Suicide will follow shortly. In the meantime, let’s all enjoy the spectacle of Boris Karloff hanging out with a family (does anybody know who they are?) on the set of 1939’s [...]
A retrospective of the stern, uncompromising works of the Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa reveals unexpected pleasures Next week, Tate Modern in London is unveiling a complete retrospective by a director who I can only describe as the Samuel Beckett of world cinema: and even that comparison doesn't quite convey how severe and how uncompromisingly difficult his movies have latterly become. This is the...
Dear Shaded Viewers, I caught up with my friend Bruce LaBruce on the rue Saint Opportune today. He's in Paris for a program he curated at the L'Etrange Festival at Forum des Images called "Carte Blanche A Bruce LaBruce." (His...
The running time of a movie often has little to do with how long it takes before your attention begins to wane, so thank heavens for the one-minute film festival There is a celebrated Hollywood anecdote about how, half-way through the premiere of Exodus (1960), Otto Preminger's sprawling 208-minute epic on the birth of Israel, Jewish comedian Mort Sahl was heard to cry: "Otto, let my people go!"...
The title of Bela Tarr's opus translates - logically enough - as 'Satan's Tango'. But if that conjures visions of demonic doings at a dance academy, put all thoughts of 'Suspiria' -stylee film-making from your mind. If Dario Argento, at his best, is flamboyant and demented, a grand guignol poet, then Tarr's visual poetry is wrought from different material and fashioned in resolutely downbeat cadences....
Hungary/Germany/Switzerland Feature Film Director: Béla Tarr Writers: László Krasznahorkai, Béla Tarr Cinematographer: Gábor Medvigy Composer: Mihály Vig Cast: Mihály Vig, László feLugossy, Putyi Horváth, Éva Almássy Albert, János Derzsi, Irén Szajki, Alfréd Járai, Miklós Székely...
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