film directors
Mia MadreFriday, 25 September 2015
After his pop at Berlusconi, The Caiman, and cheeky peek inside the papal selection process, We Have a Pope, beloved Italian director Nanni Moretti returns to the melancholy territory of his Palme d'Or winner The Son's Room for his sombre,... Read more... |
DVD: Dragon's ReturnFriday, 25 September 2015
It’s easy to forget about the Slovak side of the Czechoslovak “New Wave”: works coming out of Bratislava often seem to receive less attention, even on their home territory, than those from Prague, where the now legendary FAMU film school that gave... Read more... |
DVD: L'EclisseTuesday, 22 September 2015
Antonioni’s celebrated trio of films, L’Aventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse, established the Italian director as a major and influential force in world cinema. All three of the works deal with the failure that resides at the heart of human relationship... Read more... |
Horse MoneyTuesday, 15 September 2015
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money begins with a silent montage of Jacob Riis’s grim photographs of late 19th-century Manhattan slum dwellers, some of them former slaves or their offspring. One photo shows a bowler-hatted young black man sitting athwart a... Read more... |
PasoliniWednesday, 09 September 2015
It’s somehow unsettling that, while the physical resemblance between Willem Dafoe and Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini is remarkable to the point of being almost uncanny, Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini almost consciously avoids elucidating... Read more... |
Arena: Nicolas Roeg – It's About Time, BBC FourMonday, 29 June 2015
Rumour has it that there's a proposal floating around Hollywood to remake Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, his enthralling 1973 masterpiece of love, grief and death foretold. Anyone foolish enough to contemplate such a move should be made to watch... Read more... |
Only Angels Have WingsSaturday, 16 May 2015
Howard Hawks and Cary Grant made five films together. Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, I Was A Male War Bride and Monkey Business were all screwball comedies, made by two of the genre’s leading exponents. As an adventure film, Only Angels Have... Read more... |
DVD: EnemyTuesday, 10 February 2015
Jake Gyllenhaal and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve shot Enemy before their collaboration on Prisoners (released in 2013), but already the combination was working stunningly well. In outline, Enemy doesn't sound hugely original – university... Read more... |
DVD: Trans-Europ-Express/Successive Slidings of PleasureTuesday, 20 January 2015
Still best-known in Britain for scripting Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films as sole auteur develop that landmark work’s slippery reality. Like the novels with which he first made his name, Trans-Europ-Express... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Dubai International Film FestivalSaturday, 20 December 2014
Dubai is a city that famously emerged from the desert, founded on oil and ambition, rising in an eruption of skyscrapers, luxury resorts and bling.One might say that Gulf cinema is also trying to grow in a desert – a cultural one. Dubai is hardly... Read more... |
Rosemary's Baby, LifetimeTuesday, 18 November 2014
Polish director Agnieszka Holland is best known for two Holocaust films, both based on remarkable true stories: the 1990 Europa Europa and the 2011 release In Darkness. Here she tackles horror of the supernatural kind. This NBC two-parter is an... Read more... |
The Fall of the House of Usher, Sound Affairs, MalvernThursday, 30 October 2014
At least three composers have set about turning The Fall of the House of Usher into operas, including most famously Debussy, whose abortive attempt, completed by Robert Orledge, was brilliantly staged by Welsh National Opera in June. But there is a... Read more... |
