Thumbs Up for “Three Masters”

My latest film criticism, “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience,” excerpted in the previous post, is recommended reading for the week at RogerEbert.com. If that doesn’t get you to read, I don’t know what to do with you. (But I’ll think of something.) A further excerpt: In Saving Private Ryan, the film’s ultimate sentimentality, […]

Three Film Masters

My latest film criticism is available now at Bright Lights Film Journal. “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience” addresses the question, as the tag line has it: “Is the filmmaker tyrant, aesthete, ringmaster, or hermit?“ It is commonly claimed by artists that they create for themselves. Wrote Stanley Fish, to whom I respond,”If […]

Purity & Invention: a Claude Sautet Retrospective

. From August 1-9 this summer, The Film Society of Lincoln Center hosted a long overdue retrospective of the films of Claude Sautet (1924-2000). Probably best known to younger, more contemporary audiences for his late flowering of 1990s films Un Coeur en Hiver (A Heart in Winter) and Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (Nelly and Mr. Arnaud), Sautet established […]

CineFile – Drive

. with Ryan Gosling, by Nicolas Winding Refn. Primal eruption  and withdrawal. Related articles New Images of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ONLY GOD FORGIVES (collider.com) WTF: Nicolas Winding Refn Directing ‘Barbarella’ TV Series (slashfilm.com) ‘Only God Forgives’ Will Share The ‘Language’ Of ‘Drive’ (moviesblog.mtv.com) Behind the Scenes Photos: Ryan Gosling in ‘Only God Forgives’ […]

CineFile – The Farewell Waltz

Mervyn LerRoy’s Waterloo Bridge is a quintessential Golden Age Hollywood romance of love tragically interrupted by war. Both of its stars, Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh, later recalled their roles as perhaps the favorite of their careers. This is its most exquisite scene, offering a typically sentimentalized representation of high-cultured English civilization before the coming […]