From its first shot, here is a film that invites its own phenomenology, another potential description or requirement of the art film. We slowly zoom into a line of men…
The child scrounger is about as “neorealism” as it gets, pointing toward his counterpart in Buñuel’s Los Olvidados from a couple years later. And it’s not neorealism without a heavy dose…
Rope (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) – It’s usually just chalked up as a “great experiment,” by virtue of the precious few cuts in the film, and the disguising of most…
Une Femme Mariée (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) – Have read it said that this one empowers women, but that’s about the most superficial, narrative-prejudicial sort of reading one can imagine.…
Aria is one of the better-known omnibus films from the 80s, a strange period of film history that almost brought together the likes of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard,…
Mostly Martha/Bella Martha (2002, dir. Sandra Nettelbeck) – This is one of those food-favorite films, up there with Tampopo, Ratatouille, and even moment in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat. (Still need to…
Unfortunately, to call something “textbook” rings of negative criticism. So perhaps it’s better to say, in the case of M, that Fritz Lang wrote the (text)book on cinematic sound and…
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the few real badasses of cinema, created in Ali: Fear Eats The Soul an utterly beautiful and (forgive the term) humanistic melodrama that draws from…
My first foray into German Expressionist cinema was, fittingly, F.W. Murnau’s infamous Gothic work Nosferatu. The mother of all horror films (chronologically speaking), Nosferatu marvelously executed some great intercutting, showing…
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was an exercise in geometric film-making laden with special effects with a political/economic admonition. At the risk of bringing up W. Anderson again, the symmetry alone makes…
