Film & Television

While Sergei Eisenstein was the filmmaker-theorist who stressed that the cinema’s creation of meaning is centered on the splice, few films give Eisenstein’s idea of “intellectual montage” a more creative contemporary spin than Errol Morris’ new documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Morris shows us, in effect, two images […]

That Erin Brockovich stars Julia Roberts and was directed by Steven Soderbergh isn’t only a statement of fact but the passageway to a question that different filmgoers will have different rooting interests in: Is this a Julia Roberts movie that Soderbergh happened to direct, or a Soderbergh movie that Roberts happens to appear in? In […]

If there were an Oscar for Best Reaction Shots, the top contender in next year’s race would have to be Casey Affleck. In Nick Gomez’s agreeably overheated comedy Drowning Mona, Affleck’s character, a hard-working, sweet-natured landscape gardener named Bobby Calzone, serves as the eye of a hurricane of small-town folly and corruptibility. Since he seems […]

Moving picturesIn 1967, when the images of Appalachian coal miners had become icons for national poverty, Canadian documentary maker Hugh O’Connor set foot on Hobart Ison’s land in rural Kentucky to take pictures of a tenant, and was murdered by the landowner. Fed up with media representation and misrepresentation of Appalachian culture, Ison had vowed […]

This past December the New York Film Critics Circle voted Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy the best movie of 1999 (Leigh also won best director). I mention this in part because I doubt you’ll see the British film winning the same accolades elsewhere this year. The Oscar givers, for example, seem more likely to give their Best […]

It took about, oh, about 20 or 30 seconds for Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother to convince me that I was very likely watching one of the year’s great films. The Spanish movie opens with a sequence in which the credits shimmer onscreen in curlicued red script, then fade out again, as the camera […]

Sense and memoryBecause it hails from Lebanon and speaks a tongue other than English, Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut obviously will be classified as a foreign film. But I would offer the following as a more useful point of reference: From Being John Malkovich to The Blair Witch Project and beyond, the past year has been […]