Smart Words About Cinema
Contributor
The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr’s incomparable The Turin Horse. Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don’t watch with intense concentration, you’ll miss [...]
As long as I can remember, I’ve loved horror movies, delighted in stories about monsters getting loose in the dark, scaring complacent squares to death. Scared me, too, but deep down I confess I’ve always been primally tickled when vampires, blobs, giant bugs, werewolves, and aliens broke all the rules. What liberating joy when some [...]
AFI grad Gerardo Naranjo’s Miss Bala can’t help but make art movie aficionados swoon—and Hollywood sit up and take notice. Might there be just a whiff of opportunism, aesthetic and thematic, in this pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the victimization of a young and beautiful woman (Stephanie Sigman) inadvertently swept into the bloody war among Mexican drug [...]
[Originally written for a 2003 film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art] Pantheon director Howard Hawks (1898–1977) loved to make movies about colorful tough guys coping with actual and existential threats in the middle of some exotic nowhere. As in all the genres he made his own (the gangster film, the Western, [...]
DENDERA In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 masterpiece The Ballad of Narayama, a woman fast approaching 70—the age when the old are sent into the mountains to die—works to ensure her sons’ future well-being. Marrying fatalism and selflessness, the film measures the flow of life and death in a village that lives on the edge of starvation. [...]
ALMAYER’S FOLLY After getting up early and driving for three hours, perhaps the first film you watch in the Vancouver International Film Festival should not be Chantal Akerman’s Almayer’s Folly, all two-plus hours of it. Akerman is not the liveliest of directors; her style is lengthy staring, to frame a scene and contemplate it with [...]
by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson [Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Howard Winchester Hawks was home the afternoon of July 12, 1976. For some time there, it looked as if it wouldn’t happen. Kathleen Murphy had finally taken the leap and declared Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977. This essay on Bringing Up Baby is a chapter of the author's University of Washington doctoral dissertation Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition.] Bringing Up Baby‘s narrative and thematic directions have much in common with those of Shakespearean comedy. Positing the green world of [...]
“You know, the director will be in town on Friday. Would you like to interview him?” That’s how I was welcomed today by an eager young publicist to SIFF’s 10 a.m. screening for press and passholders of Hong-jin Na’s The Yellow Sea. “Let me check out the movie first,” I replied. But that was not [...]
In her dark, totally unsentimental films about children (Devils, Devils; Crows, I Am), Polish director Dorota Kedzierzawska has always gifted her youthful, mostly female protagonists with old, outlaw souls hungry for family and freedom. Even the lonely old woman facing her Time to Die (2007) possesses the lively face and maverick spirit of a wild [...]
Don’t expect vampire gore and supernatural thrills in this long, slow exploration of youthful angst and alienation. In his first English-language movie, writer-director Iwai Shunji clearly didn’t have commercial prospects or mainstream audiences in mind. Since he shot, edited, and composed original music for Vampire, it’s clear that Shunji knew precisely what kind of world [...]
Spain, 2010; Carlos Saura Often, watching movies like Thor and The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, not to mention SIFF’s overload of uninspired fare, a movie-lover can sink into despair, convinced that contemporary directors are totally incompetent when it comes to creating coherent form and movement within framed spaces. Then you luck into [...]
As you may already know if you attended SIFF’s Opening Night, The First Grader goes down easy, despite pedestrian scripting and direction. Quickie’d and ranked (C+) weeks ago by Entertainment Weekly, this forgettable flick about a onetime Mau Mau warrior determined to learn to read in his old age relies on two attractive performers—Naomie Harris [...]
What would the Seattle International Film Festival be if it wasn’t the biggest in the country? Piling on 450 movies at 19 different venues between May 19 and June 12, the 37th SIFF presents feature films from some 70 different countries, docs, archival treasures, secret flicks, and shorts. Every conceivable niche audience is addressed: families, [...]
By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy [Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Robert Altman visited Seattle late last year in connection with the world premiere of Welcome to L.A. at the Harvard Exit. The directorial debut of his sometime assistant director and—on Buffalo Bill and the Indians—co-screenwriter Alan Rudolph, Welcome also marked [...]