Reading great critics of the past – Agee, Farber, Kauffmann – sheds interesting light on the ways our perception of film history has been formed.
Reading Movie History
Tag: Film Criticism
The One, True Doctor and the Passage of Time
Fifty years ago today (the day after JFK was assassinated), as a nine year old boy living in a small village in southeast England, I sat down after what we then called “tea” (our evening meal) and started watching a TV show I knew nothing about. It had several characters in a blue police phone […]
Rossellini & Bergman: a collision of life and art
When approaching 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, Criterion’s new 5-disk DVD edition of the first three collaborations between the Italian filmmaker and the Hollywood star, it’s difficult not to feel a certain degree of trepidation. These three films, critical and commercial failures at the time of release, now stand as something like […]
Guest post: David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952)
Howard Curle recalls another formative experience with William K Everson’s class at NYU in the ’70s; The Sound Barrier, a key film in David Lean’s career
Room 237: an obsessive search for meaning
in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 provides free rein to five obsessive fans who air their personal interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). While other people’s obsessions can be fascinating, and conspiracy theories often provide narratives more satisfying than prosaic reality, sometimes, when overexposed, they can become exhausting and irritating. I approached Ascher’s film with a […]
Roger Ebert 1942-2013
Anyone interested in movies – and particularly anyone who writes about them – had to take note this past week of the death of Roger Ebert, the Chicago-based movie critic who over fifty years became the face and voice of criticism for a large public. He more or less fell into the role in the […]
Too big to read …
Like most people who grew up with them, books mean more to me than simply the words they contain. I bought a Kindle last year, and I have dozens of books on it, but mostly it sits untouched on a shelf. I’ve only really used it on my trips to Beijing last year and England […]
Cronenberg, Body-Horror and The Brood (1979)
Kier-La Janisse was in town over the weekend to launch her book House of Psychotic Women at the Cinematheque. To highlight the event, she chose to present a screening of David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), one of the key films in the book. While the print, which Dave Barber obtained from the national archive, had […]
Book Review: House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse
Kier-la Janisse has had a varied and colourful career as a film and music programmer in various places, including Vancouver, Austin TX, Winnipeg and Montreal; she initiated and ran a festival of horror and fantasy films in Vancouver called CineMuerte and has connections with Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival. Her first book, a slim, attractively designed […]
Anderson vs Anderson
In light of my defense of Paul W.S. Anderson a couple of weeks ago (in the context of my disappointment with Resident Evil: Retribution), I was interested to come across Armond White’s joint review of Retribution and Paul Thomas Anderson’s much-lauded The Master. White is one of the most interesting critics in the U.S. today, […]
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