Matthew Plouffe
To the growing cadre who’ve immersed themselves in the current landscape of lesser-known Japanese cinema, Kurosawa’s films remain as relevant and as highly anticipated as those of his internationally-praised contemporaries Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano.
Like his 1963 masterpiece Contempt, Notre musiques rigorous examination of cinema as fallible super-medium builds subtly into a powerful wave of hope, even despite itself.
The spirit that once defined American independent cinema is not dead. It lives in the few artists we have left, still committing images that matter, to a medium desperately in need of heroes.
"I knew that thematically I wanted to do a story about two or more guys who were going to be close at the beginning and because of the introduction of this power and changing what’s at risk, they were not going to be able to be near each other at the end. I didn’t know if they were going to kill each other or if they were going to be at war."
There was a time when young men from small towns in Texas were forced to ship out to New York or Hollywood in order to fulfill their dream of seeing themselves on the big screen.
There’s something disconcerting about the fact that you’d never guess Father and Son was made by the same filmmaker responsible for its precursor, Mother and Son.
Son frère chronicles the slow deterioration of a diseased thirtysomething, the concurrent rebirth of a brother’s bond, and may be among the filmmaker’s most affecting works to date.
"I try to figure out what the structure of the film I’m writing about should be based on and keeping myself open to not knowing what that means. To play around, get excited, go in a certain direction, then shift things around—it‘s an evolving process."
I have taken upon myself a task which I have fairly begun to regret: to write about a film nonpareil in its ability to leave me at a loss for words.
Upon returning from Cannes with a Palme d’Or in tow, Elephant was not infrequently assailed stateside as incomplete and inchoate, excoriated for all the things it of which it wasn’t enough: it wasn’t enough of an answer, it wasn’t enough of an insight, and frankly, it wasn’t a film of enough substance.
New media has relentlessly dug its cyber-claws into the heart of cinema for over 20 years now, constantly raising the bar in an industry of simulacra manipulation that seems to be entirely without limits.