While no movie can fully capture the madness of what life in a concentration camp must have been like, László Nemes’ Cannes Grand Prize Award winning Son of Saul, his first feature film, may come close to recreating the experience. Written by the director and Clara Royer and shot in 35mm with a 4:3 aspect…
Everybody is fine in Every Thing Will Be Fine. This is a title that lives up to its expectations. They’re all fine . . . just fine: Actors, cinematographer, production designer, sound mixer, editor, writer . . . filmmaker. And it would be all relatively okay were this not a Wim Wenders’ movie. It’s been…
I have to be honest, I might just have the world’s worst case of Acrophobia (for laymen, a fear of heights). This phobia could not have manifested itself any more acutely than during the newest release, The Walk, directed by Robert Zemeckis (“Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the “Back To the Future” franchise and Academy Award…
Winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (“Flight of the Red Balloon”) first film in eight years, The Assassin (Nie yin niang), may initially seem out of character for a director whose previous work has been in realistic social dramas set in a contemporary historical context. Yet it is…
Opening night at the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival, held annually in Silver Spring, Maryland, is always a treat. This year, the opener was The Final Girls, a thriller/comedy that subverts many horror-film conventions — indeed, the very notion of movies themselves. Teenager Max (Taissa Farmiga, “Anna”) happens to be the daughter of the…
The local theater where I went to view the latest Peter Pan adventure (I found myself the ONLY one in attendance, by the way), Pan, inadvertently began showing the film “Black Mass.” I went to the manager to alert them of the error, however, two hours later, I wished I hadn’t opened my big mouth….
Looking is different than seeing in the same way in which seeing is different than watching. Looking necessarily entails as much the eyes of the one who looks as the eyes of the one who’s been looked at. A look is impossible without reciprocity, for no look can be given if no look can be…
