“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.”  Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to stop his car by standing in the middle of the highway with her arms outstretched in an X pattern.  This is the first time we ... read more »

There’s certainly various elements uniting in this confident film. Individually, they don’t seem like much, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Just when Oliver Stone delivered the new Wall Street, a well-made film based on aged material looking refreshed, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin offer a well-made take on the ... read more »

Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) released by the same studio, RKO, only four years later: the gothic castle at night with its one glowing window … … the outstretched hand ... 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 »

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the films of Orson Welles (and not just Citizen Kane) should immediately check out American: Exhibits from the C.F. Kane Museum, described at The Auteurs’ Notebook, where it is temporarily posted, as “a six-part video investigation into the work of Orson Welles by B. Kite.” Kite’s technique ... read more »

I was depressed to hear about the Village Voice’s firing of critic Nathan Lee. (GreenCine Daily has collected links here.) Lee was one of the best film writers in the country – see, for example, his very New York specific review of Cloverfield – but apparently the Voice thought it didn’t really need him so ... read more »

Years ago – when I was a teenage film buff, so to speak – I remember reading someone’s description of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane as “a perfect film.” “Perfect?” I asked myself, “What about that rubber octopus? I’ve never seen anything so phony looking in my life!” I was thinking, of course, of the rubber ... read more »

In a prior post, I referred to the films of Richard Linklater as “logocentric,” by which I mean – in a good way – that no matter how visual Linklater’s films may be, they are fundamentally word-centered. (The same could be said of Godard’s.) The term is appropriated from the late Columbia professor, literary theorist, ... read more »