In this Reverse Shot Talkie, French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin sits down with host Eric Hynes to talk about his distinctive, full-bodied way of directing, and how it applied to his new film, My Golden Days.
Far Cry 2 perpetuates and depends on colonial themes and values as much as any open-world game, with the key caveat that it works a critique (or, at least, a cynicism) of the colonialist project into its playing.
First love is always critical, especially in the movies, but few are the scenarists like Desplechin who plumb it deeply enough to truly turn over all the minute pleasures and pains to find how thoroughly they shape a person.
A big influence on me was Edward Hopper, because I look at his paintings and you have two or three objects in a room, but they combine to create a mood and a whole story. Suddenly a lamp become important, or a poster or a piano, and you choose more carefully.
First-time feature director Zhao resists courting our sympathy by presenting the family life as squalid, though many Pine Ridge families live without heating, clean water, or sanitation.
I will never understand those hostile responses to Malick, which seem determined to hold the line so that American narrative cinema will not be overrun by avant-garde abstraction, as though there was a flotilla of directors making experimental films on this scale instead of literally just one guy.
The miracle of the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul—certainly among our greatest living filmmakers—is that he has used film to allow us to see through his eyes: maybe the highest compliment one can pay to a maker of moving images.
The Berlinale takes great pride in promoting itself as the most politically conscious and engaged of the A-list film festivals. After the events of the past year in Europe, refugees were the salient topic of its latest edition.
When you’re young, love is often experienced as something very pure and sweet. But later in life, love can become deconstructed, sometimes to the point of turning into a kind of bitterness.
It’s like a cautionary bedtime story told to seventeenth-century American tots by cruel parents tucking them in at night as the wind howls outside the door.
There is no narration, no translation, and no explanation for the dense thicket of ritual gestures that we are peering into, each of which, one can intuit, has behind it an entire system of symbolic meanings.
What if we could see what is actually on the other side of the world from where we sit? . . . Russian documentary filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky approaches these questions with a mixture of the digging child’s ingenuousness and the dogged explorer’s rigor and sense of purpose.
Abound with lush, multilayered imagery shot in black-and-white super 35, Embrace of the Serpent subverts time and space while mostly staying grounded in the primordial world of the Amazon jungle.
In Herzog’s 53-minute documentary on the Gulf War and its aftermath, the war begins and ends by the fourth minute.
Herzog rarely misses a chance to leap on canoes, wade through sludge, and handle native arrows. When he faces the camera and bares his zeal and fears, one glimpses a man capable of directing as well as starring in Moby Dick.