Film Review: Toward a N...

The White Ribbon directed by Michael Haneke Michael Haneke’s latest film, The White Ribbon, is easily his least controversial and most audience-friendly work. It has already earned many honors including the Palm D’Or at Cannes, three European Film Awards, and a Golden Globe for Best...

Murder at the Rijksmuse...

    Rembrandt’s J’Accuse (2009) and Nightwatching (2007), directed by Peter Greenaway Peter Greenaway has always been a visually-oriented director. Originally trained as a painter, Greenaway meticulously structures the images in his films, revealing a care and attention to the...

The Revolution will<...

Revolution is a spectacle, and terror is public performance. That, it seems, is the message of the action-filled The Baader Meinhof Complex by German director Uli Edel. Adapted from journalist Stefan Aust’s book of the same title, the film attempts to tell the “true story” of what later became known as the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF)—Germany’s Weather Underground, but with a martyr twist.

Films I Saw This Summer

Thirst With all the teen-vampire fanaticism, the foreign art-film take on Dracula might pass you by. However, Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and the Korean Park Chan-Wook’s Thirst are original romances where bloodlust is anything but skin deep. Park is best known for his vengeance triology, (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). In these films, characters who are subjected to violence become heroes when they retaliate with elaborate murder schemes. One suffers through gore in his films’ first half, but the conclusive proof of justice is in fact more blood and pain. Eventually, the carnage becomes more delicious than disgusting, for it is all bloodshed in the name of fairness.

Two Contemporary Hells

Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen, and Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, both at the IFC Center. Hunger and Gomorrah, two films now showing at the IFC Center, offer grim, unsparing views of the human condition–a kind of Platonically perfect "bad vibes" double...

The State of French Cin...

French Cinema in 2008, at the César awards. My expectations for the 2008 César awards were high. Since the French make better films, dress better and speak a better language, surely their Academy Awards would be superior. What’s more, I was suffering from cinema...