Category: Film review

I’ve had Bazin on the brain lately, partly in conjunction with spending last week discussing the form and function of criticism as well as reading the Winter 2007 issue of Film International dedicated to Bazin. It’s a provocative magazine (expect a blog on it soon), such as when guest editor Jeffrey Crouse highlights Bazin’s “striking assertion, a dazzlement” traced through the work of Flaherty, Renoir, Vigo, Chaplin, and the neorealists: “In my opinion,” Bazin wrote, “the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up in love.” This wasn’t rhetorical flare or mere sentiment, but a sustained argument about …

Now that serial killer musicals are back in fashion, LACMA’s screening last Fridayof Michael Powell’s rarely seen Bluebeard’s Castle (1964)–with Powell’s widow and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance–seems especially appropriate. Made for West German TV in the doldrums of Powell’s post-Peeping Tom (1960) blacklisting, it’s a startlingly expressionist, one-act, one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok’s sole opera (with lyrics by film theorist Bela Balazs).

The producer/star Norman Foster (who should not be confused with the Hollywood actor/director of the same name, and whose widow recently approved distribution of the film with Powell’s summary subtitles) plays the mythological duke; …

Last weekend, I caught the West Coast premiere of George A. Romero’s latest zombie allegory, Diary of the Dead, and judging from memory, I think it’s my favorite installment since the 1968 original (which is the only one I’ve seen more than once). It’s got all the ingredients you might expect–slow moving and ravenous dead, resourceful and opportunistic characters, black humor, and creature feature gore–but this time out, the elements seem particularly impassioned and conscientiously formed. Personalities are intelligent and emotionally complex without edging out their function, the humor is softer and more existential, and even the violence seems …