ANATOMY OF A FALL asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of truth. How the reality that each of us inhabits that may be diametrically different from the one inhabited by the people closest to us. Such is the nature of perception, and the unconscious biases that we all carry that persistently assert themselves despite our… Read More »
NOSTALGIA
Click here for the flashback interview with Mark Pellington for THE LAST WORD. Polynesians have a word for the power with which we imbue inanimate objects. Manu. There are supernatural overtones to the word’s meaning in its original sense, but the power that objects have for the characters in Mark Pellington’s NOSTALGIA, if not strictly… Read More »
Matt Ross is CAPTAIN FANTASTIC
CAPTAIN FANTASTIC opens with a deer hunt. It’s graphic. It’s violent. Yet there is something about it that shows enormous respect for the animal, and for the young man who brings it down using only a knife. This is not sport, it’s food. That sequence was the first thing I brought up on July 7,… Read More »
Laurie Anderson Shares the HEART OF A DOG
Where oh where to start when talking to Laurie Anderson? A performance artist, musician, actress, filmmaker, first NASA artist-in-residence, and all around great soul, she was in San Francisco to talk about her new film, HEART OF A DOG, a film that uses her dog Lola Belle’s life and death as a touchstone for a… Read More »
ABOUT SCHMIDT
With ABOUT SCHMIDT, Alexander Payne fixes the same acute eye he used in both CITIZEN RUTH and ELECTION to once again rip the façade of wholesome gentility from the upper middle class of the heartland of America and to show us the savagery beneath. Again Payne has chosen the milieu Nebraska, the home of the… Read More »
THE BRIDGE
Eric Steel’s documentary THE BRIDGE is strong stuff, taking as it does the taboos of both death and of suicide and focusing on them without flinching. Almost the first image on screen is that of an anonymous someone stepping over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge and while the world goes on around him,… Read More »
Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu is BIUTIFUL
Until now Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu has made films that feature multiple story lines of people in crisis. With BIUTIFUL, he follows one story from beginning to end, but loses none of the complexity or richness of his previous work. It also incorporates part of his own experience of feeling a brush with death. When I… Read More »