Shaun of the Dead

Inglourious Basterds so renewed my love for Quentin Tarantino that I find myself even going back to directors I can indirectly tie to him. ...

Duplicity

Tony Gilroy is a curious case. We tend to celebrate verbosity in screenplays, from the nonstop wit of Herman J. Mankiewicz to the madcap ref...

In the Loop

Director Armando Iannucci describes In the Loop , a spinoff of his BBC series The Thick of It , as an "anti- West Wing " in that i...

Peeping Tom

The first shots of Peeping Tom switch from an extreme close-up of its lead's eye to the viewfinder of his hidden camera. The camera...

Breathless

I have seen Jean-Luc Godard's debut Breathless four times now, each time struggling to reconcile the parts of it I absolutely adore wit...

Yi Yi

Edward Yang's three-hour opus Yi Yi opens at a wedding and closes with a funeral. In between, it runs the gamut of the big questions of...

Permanent Vacation

Having previously only seen three films by Jim Jarmusch, one of the filmmakers who, along with Gus Van Sant, Richard Linklater and the Coen ...

1989 Rewind: Drugstore Cowboy

Gus Van Sant's sophomore effort is a reference-worthy entry into two separate, though occasionally linked, genres: the outlaw road movie...

Inglourious Basterds

It occurred to me right before I walked into the theater to see Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds that perhaps the reason for hi...

Carpenter's Tools: Someone's Watching Me!

In between 1978's Halloween and 19890's The Fog , John Carpenter directed two made-for-TV films, Someone's Watching Me! and an...

Carpenter's Tools: Starman

What fresh Carpenter is this? After establishing himself as one of the best niche directors, well, ever, he stumbled slightly with the Steph...

The Class

François Bégaudeau is immediately believable as a teacher struggling to impart knowledge on inner city youth. That should be obvious as, amo...