A Tale of Two Vampyres

My latest piece at Spectrum Culture is a comparison between F.W. Murnau's seminal Nosferatu  and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake starrin...

Capsule Reviews: Weekend, Tuesday After Christmas, Into the Abyss, Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Weekend (Andrew Haigh, 2011) Occasionally a bit precious in its cinematography (one too many woozy shots and obvious visual cues), Andrew Ha...

Plastic Bag

How I have managed to elude Ramin Bahrani's short film Plastic Bag for months baffles me. Bahrani, the greatest newcomer to American ci...

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

The release of every new Nicolas Cage feature brings with it a question: will we be getting the Nicolas Cage of actorly fearlessness -- the ...

Aguirre: The Wrath of God

When people learn that I hope to become a film critic after I graduate college, they immediately ask me what my favorite film is. I'm no...

Stroszek

I have seen films more bizarre than Werner Herzog's 1976 opus Stroszek , but none perhaps that are odder. I would scarcely call it an av...

Werner Herzog Documentaries and Shorts Vol. 1

As strange as Werner Herzog's feature-length films are, his shorts are often weirder. Freed of the necessity of at least some narrative,...

Land of Silence and Darkness

Werner Herzog got his start in the 60s making short documentaries and narrative films for television, finally producing feature-length work ...

Rescue Dawn

I don't know why I never saw Rescue Dawn in theaters. I've always enjoyed war films, but for whatever reason I missed out. Then whe...