So many music videos and television commercials have ripped off the imagery of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad since its 1961 release that it makes perfect sense for someone to have created a music video consisting entirely of shots from the original film. The Asian singing voice reminds us of the affinities between Resnais’s ... read more »

Check out the latest issue of Film Comment, containing an excellent, though regrettably short, piece by Richard Combs praising the formal achievement of Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967). “About time,” says I. Though film historians occasionally cite The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre as an effective genre piece – it is almost a ... read more »

The upcoming release of Alain Resnais’s classic Last Year at Marienbad on Blu-ray DVD reminds us that Marienbad was one of the many formally ambitious films released in the 1960s that popular critic Pauline Kael simply didn’t “get.” Blind to its visual beauties, indifferent to its innovative stylistic strategies, she dismissed Resnais’s masterwork as pretentious ... read more »

1) Because the 86-year-old French maitre is still making movies (such as Les Herbes folles, currently in post-production); and 2) Because he’s around to personally supervise the DVD transfers of his early masterpieces (such as the Region 2 version of Muriel, ou Le temps d’un retour (above, top) reviewed by Glenn Kenny here, and the ... read more »

Everybody knows the music Maurice Jarre wrote for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago (“Lara’s Theme”). Much less well known are the scores he wrote before Lawrence – including one of Alain Resnais’s first short subjects (Toute la Memoire du Monde, 1956), and the short films and, later, features of French poetic surrealist, Georges Franju. ... read more »

How to describe the films of Charlie Kaufman . . . Ingmar Bergman with laughs? Close, but that makes Kaufman sound too much like Woody Allen, a useful comparison maybe, but one that deemphasizes an essential aspect of Kaufman, his fascination with time and memory. And Kaufman is far more tied to Surrealism/Theater of the ... read more »

Watching the opening sequence of Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu on DVD, I had a feeling of … déjà vu! There was something familiar about the tone, the editing, the elegiac music, the way these fragmented images of people arriving at a port – specifically, the port of New Orleans – passed in front of the ... read more »