From coppers and gangsters to cowboys and cattle barons (with a few soldiers, wildcatters and ancient warriors thrown in for good measure), Film Forum’s three-week retrospective of director Anthony Mann offers an unbeatable rogue’s gallery of hardboiled antiheroes. Paul Brunick tackles some critical misconceptions of Mann’s work throughout his career.
Before Preston Sturges became a marquee-name comedy director in the 1940s, he spent a decade as a studio-hopping screenwriter, knocking out scripts and dialogue polishes at the speed of ticker tape. His furiously fast, whizbang witticisms were the stuff of instant legend, and his 1937 screenplay for Easy Living (screening at Film Forum this Sunday) may be the best work of his pre-directorial career.
The great film critic Stanley Cavell once wrote that his enjoyment of The Awful Truth was “especially dependent on the presence of an appreciative audience.” Fortunately for us New Yorkers, this 1937 screwball classic will be screening to a predictably packed house this Friday and Saturday when it kicks off the opening weekend of Film Forum’s “Madcap Manhattan” retrospective.
How can one explain the wonderful and terrifying magic of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 adaptation of The Red Shoes? A film about creative obsession, it has itself become the object of such obsession.
Half a century old but joltingly relevant, Elia Kazan’s Wild River sheds more light on the promises and pitfalls of our current political moment than almost anything you’ll catch on cable news.
“I’m fascinated by the idea of a film as an exhibition, and the exhibition as a film,” the director Peter Greenaway said in this 1997 BOMB interview. If he hadn’t arrived there already with The Pillow Book, in many ways a filmic homage to painting, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse definitively achieves the former half of the equation.
Watching Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum made me realize how difficult it is to write about familial love. It seems like it should be easy: the relationships we have with our family members are our first and therefore most deeply seeded, however most film portrayals come out as glib quirk-fests or histrionic documentations of trauma (or a combination of the two).
An ode to being human and the need to express one’s self, Our City Dreams tells the story of the loves and the sufferings of five women who chose to move to New York City. Tracing the lives of Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic and Nancy Spero. The documentary style film, directed by [...]
Chiara Clemente’s Our City Dreams premieres at Film Forum Wednesday, February 4. The documentary strings together the self told narratives of five woman artists; Swoon, Ghada Amer, Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, and Nancy Spero. Woven together the womens stories collectively tell a story about New York. OUR CITY DREAMS will have a 2-week engagement, February 4-17, [...]
Fans of Carlos Reygadas’ Japón and Battle in Heaven take note: there are no bird strangulations or obese people having sex in this film. Set in a Mennonite community in picturesque Northern Mexico, Silent Light is the story of a conflicted married Mennonite man, Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), who is in love with another woman.
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