Death of a Cyclist
May 15, 2008
Director Juan Antonio Bardem has been cited as being a vital factor in launching modern Spanish cinema. His film, Death of a Cyclist (1955), was one of the first Spanish films to win the critics prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Bardem was inspired by...
Pierrot le fou: Criterion Collection
February 29, 2008
Based on Lionel White’s crime novel, Obsession, Pierrot le fou (1965) was originally going to star Richard Burton as a man who leaves his family to hook up with a younger girl to be played pop singer Sylvie Vartan. However, both were unavailable, so...
Breathless: Criterion Collection
December 18, 2007
Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) is arguably the most famous example of the French New Wave, a group of film critics who were inspired by classic Hollywood films to become filmmakers themselves. Breathless certainly wasn’t the first French New...
Mala Noche
October 10, 2007
Mala Noche (1985) was Gus Van Sant’s feature film debut and an early example of what would become known as New Queer Cinema in the 1990s. More significantly, it was the first film in an informal trilogy set in Portland, Oregon that would also include...
Inland Empire
September 13, 2007
“A woman in trouble.” That is David Lynch’s concise synopsis for his latest film, Inland Empire (2006), but it could easily describe any one of his female protagonists, from Lula traveling along the weird, yellow brick road in Wild at Heart (1990)...
Stranger Than Paradise
September 7, 2007
Stranger Than Paradise (1984) not only announced the arrival of an original filmmaker with Jim Jarmusch, but also signaled the arrival of a new wave of American independent cinema along with the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) and Spike Lee’s She’s...
Cria Cuervos
August 21, 2007
Throughout most of his career, Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura faced off against state censors over the political content in his films, forcing him to implicitly critique Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War. However, by the time...
Ivan’s Childhood
August 2, 2007
Ivan’s Childhood (1962) was Andrei Tarkovsky’s first film and it is certainly an impressive debut. The script was based on a novella by Vladimir Bugomolov but when the novice director came on board he reworked it with his friend Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky....
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
July 12, 2007
WR: The Mysteries of the Organism (1971) is one of those cinematic oddities that could only have come out of the 1960s and be made (and released) in the 1970s when pushing the boundaries of cinema was prevalent. It is a funky hybrid of documentary, fiction...
La Jetée/Sans Soleil
July 5, 2007
Chris Marker is a celebrated writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer and, in recent years, a digital multimedia artist. He lives in Paris and rarely, if ever, grants interviews. This places an emphasis on his art rather than the artist....
