Category: media

“The long and faithful collaboration between director Bela Tarr and novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai stands apart. Spanning five features over a quarter of a century, two of them indebted to the writer’s novels, their alliance is among the most triumphant of enduring novelist-director pairings, alongside Graham Greene and Carol Reed. And the shared vision pursued in their works — of human longing, struggle and folly in a disintegrating, predatory world, where all paths only circle back unto themselves — has been, above all, uncompromising.”

In WWI Britain, “a million horses were taken overseas, pulled out of farms, breweries and every industry you can think of, most of them had no experience of being near anything that went bang and they went through a hell of a time.”

Why is Quebecois cinema suddenly so popular with the Oscars (Incendies, Monsieur Lazhar) and with filmgoers? “For way too long, Quebec cinema was stuck in a pure-laine universe that was virtually entirely white and Franco. Quebec cinema is opening up to the real Quebec and that’s partly why the world is opening up to Quebec cinema.”

“The subject of nudity clauses has come up with increasing regularity these days, particularly as more flesh is being revealed on network television. Though naked actors may be more prevalent than ever, the choice not to show all is also more accepted.”

“An Eastern Western full of train robberies, masked bandits, and shoot-outs in dry gulches, … set in the 1920s during China’s Warlord Period,” Let the Bullets Fly is likely “the most savage anti-corruption movie ever made in China, and the most cynical comedy about state-sponsored criminality.”

At every turn, the Berlinale dished up a healthy does of rebellion, from the festival’s French opening entry, “Farewell My Queen,” a lush costume epic about Marie Antoinette and the women around her in the final days of the ancien régime, to the restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s “October,” which was given a gala screening with a full orchestra.

“To get consumers excited about managing their movies online and steer them away from cheap rentals and piracy, Warner Bros. wants to lead the way in persuading people to convert billions of DVDs into digital files.”

“The more stringently the ceremony tries to remind viewers about the magic of movies, the less appealing the whole thing seems; the good-medicine approach always backfires in entertainment.”

Kirk Maynard’s puppets, “including a bucktoothed squirrel, a lime-green lawyer and an obese man with a removable beard, … are covering one of the biggest corruption trials in Ohio history – delivering their reports of real testimony and wiretapped conversations from a yearslong investigation of Jimmy Dimora, [a] Democratic kingpin.”

Masao Adachi was part of two underground movements in 1960s Japan: avant-garde film and leftist protest. (He later joined the Japanese Red Army.) “Now 72, Mr. Adachi is the focus of renewed interest: part exemplar and part cautionary tale, a figure who lived out the dilemma of merging art and politics more fully and messily than just about any of his radicalized peers.”