by Ryland Walker Knight — Beaming and leaning Last Year at Marienbad [Alain Resnais, 1961] # I could watch this movie a million times. A lot funnier than I remembered, though I remembered it being funny, I think. Another reason to own a Blu-ray player, no doubt. I wrote a smarter, funnier response over here . City of Sadness [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1989] Not quite the emotional experience I'd expected,...
More than ten years ago, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, then still located in Golden Gate Park, hosted a retrospective of the work of Taiwanese master filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I was preparing an extended trip abroad myself at the time, and missed the entire cycle, but upon my return I often heard Hou's name spoken in hushed tones by local moviegoers, and determined to seek his work out. I began...
It's pretty easy for us movie bloggers to complain about every unoriginal idea that comes out of Hollywood. But news like today's non-shocker about the board game "Risk" being turned into a movie is the film blogosphere's bread and butter....
Le voyage du ballon rouge [ Flight of the Red Balloon ] – dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien [Edited together from previous entries] There are so many singular aspects of Flight of the Red Balloon , Hou Hsiao-hsien’s first film made outside of Asia, to marvel at that it's almost stupefying that the film encompasses them with such ease. Firstly, there's Mark Lee Pin Bing's cinematography, with is so ravishing...
The central figure of Hong Sang-soo's new film Night and Day, like most of the director's artist-type protagonists, is a pretentious buffoon. Intelligent only in his ability to co-opt other peoples' opinions, Korean painter Seong-nam (Kim Yeong-ho) has fled to Paris after getting ratted out over smoking marijuana with some friends. At night, he cries on the phone to his smart, loving wife about how...
Aardman Animation, the UK studio responsible for the "Wallace & Gromit" films and "Chicken Run" have announced a new movie in the works. But it won't be directed by Nick Park, Peter Lord or any of the other great animators employed by Aardman. Instead, children throughout Britain will collaborate on every aspect of the project, [...]
For Juliette Binoche, who lives and often works in Paris, the opportunity to star in a film that celebrates her city - and is called "Paris," no less - was pretty much irresistible.
Save Film at LACMA clearly has no intention of going away. The grassroots organization has been a thorn in the side of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ever since the institution revealed in July that it was closing...
Hong Kong-based director Yonfan's "Prince of Tears" premieres Friday at the Venice Film Festival 20 years to the hour after Golden Lion-winner "City of Sadness," the last major film to confront a painful period of Taiwanese history known as the White Terror.
International News: Yash Chopra named filmmaker of the year -- The 14th Pusan Film Festival will honor Bollywood multihyphenate Yash Chopra with its Asian filmmaker of the year award.
By Steven Boone [ Still Walking is now playing at the Angelika and Lincoln Plaza cinemas in Manhattan. ] Hirokazu Kore-eda's Still Walking could have been made in 1949 by Yasujiro Ozu. I guess we hear that about a lot of films. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumiere was a direct homage that really took Ozu's restraint to a certain (yawn) extreme. Directors as diverse as Jim Jarmusch and Mike Leigh...
by Steven EricksonHirokazu Kore-eda is the only major Japanese director of his generation who is a direct descendant of his cinematic forefathers' humanism. Many of the best Japanese films of the past 15 years—Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse , Takashi Miike's Audition , Koji Wakamatsu 's United Red Army —are almost defiantly post-humanist. They depict a country...
The two-week-plus campaign to Save Film at LACMA continues (be sure to read Time art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo’s article from yesterday), but Los Angeles’ fall film scene is beginning to promise highlights: • “Cigarettes & Alcohol: Eight Films by Hong Sang-soo” (Sept. 11-19) I’ve seen all of Hong’s films except for The Day a Pig Fell [...]
Not one to rest on her acting laurels -- or her great beauty -- Juliette Binoche is risking the sting of U.S. art critics by showing a series of her portraits in New York this fall. In September, Binoche will...
Reverse Shot has just published another of their storied auteur symposiums, where pieces on just about every film by a director are given serious critical appreciation by a talented host of young writers. I’ve contributed to past symposiums, including one on Hou Hsiao Hsien last year. This time they’re casting a much-deserved spotlight on Claire [...]
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