“You’re tearing me apart!”
The line–the plaintive cry–is synonymous with Rebel Without A Cause and hence with Nicholas Ray. I hope to say more about Ray as I word through some of his films this summer, …

My relationship with the films of Ingmar Bergman has been analogous to that with a popular elder at a new church: I respect the title and all, but I usually find myself squinting when people …

1After a night of flirtations at an upscale Christmas party, a doctor’s wife (Nicole Kidman as Alice Harford) confesses a sexual fantasy to her husband. Unable to cope with her revelation, the doctor (Tom …

If you enter the terms “servant,” “losey,” and “creepy” into the Google search engine, you get approximately nine hundred hits. Not all of them, of course, are using the “c” word in connection to Joseph Losey’s 1963 film starring Dirk Bogarde and “introducing” James Fox, but enough of them are to make it clear that “creepy” is the adjective of choice for talking vaguely about Losey’s film without having to get too specific.

I begin this post not with a comment about the film but about Claude Chabrol’s interview with Mark Shivas (originally in the 1963 volume of Movie). Consider the following exchange discussing Chabrol’s first film, Le …

The films at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival were varied in their subject matter. There were advocates of weather modification, a history of the American-Indian Movement, and a portrait of the exiled queen of Iran. We saw Jews in the city of Thessaloniki, troop greeters in the city of Bangor, advertising executives on Madison avenue, and Christian prison administrators in Argentina. There was a reporter in Africa trying to get us to remember Darfur and a father in America who was either trying to remember anything or forget everything. There was a blind couple using music to communicate love, a deaf boy at the center of a very loud controversy, and a horde of mute Japanese-American detainees whose only voice was a stranger’s camera. Oh, and there was Superman–turns out he’s Muslim and he lives in India.