I think both Alexei German's Hard To Be A God (above) and Abderrahamane Sisako's Timbuktu are masterpieces, but they're also films that demonstrate the necessary elasticity of the possibly overused term.…
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“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Hunter S. Thompson used that Samuel Johnson observation as the epigraph for his 1971…
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Last month the Film Society of Lincoln Center showed, as part of its "Strange Lands: International Sci-Fi" series, Karel Zeman's 1958 Vynálaz zkázy, an unusual live-action/animation hybrid derived from several…
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While I mull over whether to compose and post an essay titled "The Woody Allen Plank" (it's not likely, I gotta say), I ask you to check out the movie…
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Godard in Eric Rohmer's Le Signe du Lion, 1959, when he was about 30. "The public is neither stupid nor intelligent. No one knows what it is. Sometimes it surprises,…
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"He strums the wire with his fingers." From The Counselor, Ridley Scott, 2013 Ridley Scott's The Counselor, from an original script by Cormac McCarthy, inspired quite a bit of critical…
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