Prince: For You (1978)

Before Prince Rogers Nelson turned 20 years old, he cut his teeth in a funk group where he soon eclipsed peer and mentor alike, got himself ...

(ParaNorman, Sam Fell & Chris Butler, 2012)

The stop-motion animation studio Laika follows up their superlative work on Henry Selick's 2009 Coraline  with another adventure-horror ...

Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)

Life, and Nothing More...  undercut Where Is the Friend's Home?  by acknowledging the falseness of its diegetic reality as it added anot...

Side By Side (Christopher Kenneally, 2012)

Side By Side  is, thankfully, not merely a mere account of aesthetic differences between film and digital. Instead, it asks serious question...

The Top 10 Steven Soderbergh Films

[This is my August entry in the Favorite Directors Blogathon .] Steven Soderbergh operates so far under the radar that, for all his auteuris...

50 Book Pledge #15: James Joyce—Finnegans Wake

Regular readers might remember my original plans to offer regular updates on my trek through Joyce's final and most abstruse work, Finne...

50 Book Pledge #16: Laurent Binet—HHhH: A Novel

If two things in this world have been done to death they are the WWII historical novel and glib, self-referential postmodernism that sideste...

4:44: The Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2012)

The characters in Abel Ferrara's 4:44: The Last Day on Earth  react to the world's impending doom with astonishing calm. Perhaps the...

R.I.P. Tony Scott, 1944-2012

I was devastated last night to read of Tony Scott's suicide in Los Angeles. One of the most exciting filmmakers working in Hollywood tod...

$upercapitalist (Simon Yin, 2012)

An anti-hedge fund screed set to a screen saver slideshow of Hong Kong, $upercapitalist  clumsily delivers its ideas in stilted chunks that ...

Free Radicals: A Story of Experimental Film (Pip Chodorov, 2012)

The article of Free Radicals ' title gives away its main strength and weakness: this is a  story of experimental film, not the  story. F...

Sign 'O' the Times (Prince, 1987)

Like Purple Rain , the film of Sign 'O' the Times  matches the album it supports. The former visualizes the artist in ascendancy, ma...

Matinee (Joe Dante, 1993)

Matinee  feels like a skeleton key for Joe Dante's entire career. It combines satirical targets and stylistic influences typically given...

Life, and Nothing More... (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992)

Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's Home?  was a watershed release, exposing the director to the world and establishing him as ...

All About My Mother (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999)

Pedro Almodóvar's films are so stuffed with irony that even the sympathetic streak underneath his wild transgression can sometimes seem ...

Where is the Friend's Home? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987)

Where Is the Friend's Home?  announces the intimacy of its focus from its opening shot, held on a door in close-up as the credits roll. ...