Roger Ebert: No Longer an Eater, Still a Cook

After losing his lower jaw to cancer, the film critic, who can’t eat, has written a cookbook that is an ode to the rice cooker. In those first few moments at the table, you try not to look at the empty place where his jaw used to be. You wonder how it feels to receive [...]

Orlando Does Not Fade: Revisiting Tilda Swinton’s legendary “nonperformance”

When Sally Potter’s free-wheeling Orlando came to the Sundance film festival in 1993, it didn’t exactly fit the profile of a festival breakout. It wasn’t a regional character drama like Gas Food Lodging or Mississippi Masala. It wasn’t handmade and idiosyncratic like sex, lies, and videotape or Slacker. It wasn’t a blood-spattered action picture, like [...]

Compare reviews of Inception: Filmspotting, Ebert, Wilmington, Phillips & Mozaffar

Sometimes the first adjective spoken in a movie speaks volumes. The first one you hear in the new thriller Inception is “delirious,” describing the psychological state of a man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has washed up (or awakened) on a beach and is brought into the home of a wealthy man he has known [...]

Mythic Past, Resonating in the Present

Even as it modernizes, India has carved a place for its mythic past. The most talked-about movies in India this summer are based on the two great epics of Hinduism: the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. It isn’t just Indian cinema that is smitten with those two works. The Difficulty of Being Good, a recent book [...]

Where are today’s Leonardo’s? Toy Story

Andy Warhol did not know how near he was to the end of his life when he painted his own compelling set of variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Or did he intuit it? His black screenprints reduce Leonardo’s subtle tones to a bleak tearjerker, a grief stain. In an interview he said there [...]

Gulliver’s Travels in 3-D

Even though it’s one of the most widely-adapted books of all time – spawning cartoons, radio plays, French turn of the century silent films, strange Russian pro-Communist puppetry adaptations and mid-1990s Ted Danson vehicles to name but a few – you could argue that nobody has ever been able to fully capture the spirit of [...]

Inspired by Metropolis

The February 2010 German Vogue has a special cover feature photographed by Karl Lagerfeld, inspired by the new Metropolis restoration. David Mallet’s 1984 music video for Radio Ga Ga features scenes from Fritz Lang‘s 1927 sci-fi movie Metropolis—Freddie Mercury’s solo song Love Kills was used in Giorgio Moroder‘s restored version of the film, and in [...]

Silent movies can trigger a soundtrack in our minds

The next time you are sat in front of the TV, push the mute button and keep watching the images. What can you hear? The chances are that your brain will try to fill in for some of the lost sound track. The pictures on the screen trigger memories and these are replayed in your [...]

The Complete Metropolis

more about “The Complete Metropolis“, posted with vodpod The most influential of all silent films — and a blueprint for future classics like Blade Runner and The Matrix — Fritz Lang’s visionary Metropolis can finally be seen as intended, with 25 minutes of newly—discovered footage and Gottfried Huppertz’s magnificent original score. The addition of this [...]

Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World

Into the Deep: America, Whaling & the World, a new American Experience documentary by Ric Burns, is alive with the all-or-nothing ethos of the nineteenth-century whaleman. Drawing its central narrative arc from two of the most famous man-versus-whale tales of the era—the true, though at the time unthinkable, story of the Essex, a whaleship sunk [...]

Next Page »