March 26, 2012
Essential Killing is all the more political a work for refusing the obvious ways it could be about politics.
March 21, 2012
Lately Gibson has taken the role of embittered, vengeful victim beyond performance.
Mad as Mel
March 20, 2012
Slacker at Twenty
Slacker, though often canonized as a portrait of 1990s youth culture, is at root a local film. It was shot and produced entirely in Austin with local non-actors and musicians like the Butthole Surfers’ drummer Teresa Taylor. The fictionalized, documentary-style film doesn’t have a plot or recurring characters.
March 19, 2012
Film in Khmer culture acts as an emotional release for all the hidden things these young people were never told about
Our Pol Pot
March 16, 2012
The master takes us there, but we will learn nothing we don’t teach ourselves.
What We Learn We Teach Ourselves
March 15, 2012
Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul
If Weerasethakul’s movies are everything I think they are—mysterious, haunting, inventive—in a word, good—why do they make me fall asleep?
These are very slow, irruptively weird movies, where ugly faces break spontaneously into gorgeous, toothy grins and no one screams and runs away when a monkey-man shows up to dinner. Weerasethakul’s films present a challenge to the normal grammar of criticism, which strives to articulate what a work is “about.” What they are “about” is less interesting than what they are about to get into, or turn into.
March 14, 2012
The movie is practically a catalog of everything Brecht thought you shouldn’t do.
The Three-Trillion-Dollar Opera
March 13, 2012
In late Varda forgetting becomes a structuring mechanism and a stylistic impetus: memory takes shape collectively.
Parts and Labor
March 5, 2012
In Tiny Furniture, nobody goes to clubs or Broadway. Nobody even really goes outside.
Made in Manhattan
February 24, 2012
Film producers in America, from the highest to the lowest, constantly tell us how much film critics don’t matter.
Editor's Note
February 24, 2011
For a certain kind of critic—certainly for us—Costa holds a place of great stature in cinema.
Costa in Indiana
February 24, 2011
There is a can you believe they can do that? quality to the reception of things created only to be gaped at.
