Dispatches from the 65th Berlinale, Days 1 & 2
Two days and one Competition film in, and I already have been fortunate enough to see a work that will be certain to number among the crowning achievements of the 65th Berlinale (the Berlin Film...
View ArticleDispatches from the 65th Berlinale, Days 3 & 4
One of the most significant developments in world cinema during the past half decade has been director Jafar Panahi’s response to his jail term and twenty-year filmmaking ban, ostensibly for making...
View ArticleDispatches from the 65th Berlinale, Days 5 & 6 + Listing My Best of the Fest
Deeply divisive in its Berlinale world premiere, though it is still the betting favorite to take home the festival’s first prize, the highly fragmented, boundlessly lyrical Knight of Cups (2015), the...
View ArticleAn Academy Award® post-mortem, American Sniper & looking ahead to Timbuktu
In a field that included an experimental and deeply moving portrait of maturation made over an unprecedented twelve-year period (Boyhood), a summarizing achievement from the best director of his...
View ArticleStaging Banality or “Have you seen L’Avventura by Antonioni?”: Reading...
Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu’s brilliant When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (2013; screening Friday, March 20 at 9:00 p.m. and Saturday, March 21 at 5:30 p.m.) opens with an extended...
View ArticleThe Devil, Probably: French TV Produces a Cinematic Masterpiece
As the final season of AMC’s Mad Men is about to begin, we are once again reminded of the remarkable legacy for which that program, along with the network’s Breaking Bad, HBO’s The Sopranos and The...
View ArticleReflections on Jauja (2014) & a Radical New Direction for Lisandro Alonso
Thirty-nine year-old Lisandro Alonso is one of the most original and distinctive filmmakers to emerge in the early 21st century. Beginning with 2001’s La Libertad, the Argentinian director’s startling...
View ArticleLa Sapienza, or Cinema as Art History + Clouds of Sils Maria
Titled partially after Italian Baroque architect Francesco Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, which was itself named for the Sapienza University of Rome, La Sapienza (2014, screening Thursday, April...
View ArticleFrom Mayerling to Montès: Exploring the Nationless Cinema of Max Ophüls
Over the next two Thursdays, Museum Film will be presenting a pair of 19th-century historical epics by the great Max Ophüls, best known today for his lavish romances, made in both Hollywood and Western...
View ArticlePather Panchali and the Poetry of the Particular
Screening over three consecutive nights at the Noble Theater (Thurs., June 4-Sat., June 6, at 8 p.m. each night), Satyajit Ray’s The Apu Trilogy (1955-1959) inaugurated a new, alternative form of...
View ArticleMuseum Films Presents La Semaine du film français
Joining, no doubt, the many venues hosting French film series this week, in commemoration of Bastille Day (July 14th), the Oklahoma City Museum of Art will be screening five new works–and one recently...
View ArticlePortraits of Women: From Posed & Composed to The Princess of France and When...
There’s a moment early in this Thursday’s superlative seventy-minute Shakespeare update, The Princess of France (Matías Piñeiro, 2014), that deftly captures the approach of the Museum’s new original...
View ArticleMuseum Films Presents: Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (2014)
Having the stalwart appearance of being cut from stone as much as being figures traced in the light, the subjects of Pedro Costa’s Horse Money (2014; screening Thurs., August 20th at 8 p.m. only), the...
View ArticleIntroducing Germany’s Master of Suspense & His Exquisitely Subtle Muse
Neither fish nor fowl, the films of Berlin master Christian Petzold fall somewhere between festival-brand art cinema and commercial practice, occupying much the same space that was once staked by the...
View ArticleIn memory of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) & in praise of No Home Movie
Chantal Akerman has been on my mind quite a bit these past few weeks, even before Tuesday’s sad news of her unexpected passing. But more on that in a moment. The Belgian-born filmmaker remains best...
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