Beyond the Forest Dir. King Vidor, 1949 In America, the tagline read “Nobody’s As Good As Bette When She’s Bad.”  In French they simply called it La Garce, ‘the bitch.’ They were on to something.  Bette Davis’ character, Rosa Moline, is just about the most hissable woman ever put on screen in film, right up ... read more »

Double Take Dir. Johan Grimonprez The documentary Double Take is bookended by two of the scariest moments in American history: the launch of Sputnik and the release of The Birds.  It suggests that these events had a great deal to do with one another.  In their collage-essay on the work of Alfred Hitchock and the ... read more »

The Dark House (Dom Zły) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess.  Take melina, an alcoholic’s den, lined with old newspapers, empty bottles, cigarette butts, and plates of half-eaten food.  Syf – the stinking pile of vegetable scraps behind the chicken coop ... read more »

The Miscreants of Taliwood, dir. George Gittoes Nénette, dir. Nicolas Philibert I recently spent a week at the Warsaw Documentary Film Festival. The two films that made the deepest impression on me – The Miscreants of Taliwood, by George Gittoes, about the film industry in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, and Nénette, by Nicolas Philibert, about ... read more »