Category: Film review

Alfred Hitchcock may have preferred “slices of cake” to “slices of life,” but the cinema has excelled at both ever since its inception. If the latter is more rare in American film production, it has appeared from the works of Robert J. Flaherty to Little Fugitive (1953), a film remembered this year for the death of Morris Engel last May and for its impact on independent cinema, John Cassavetes, and the French New Wave. More than painting, music, or literature, film has an astonishing ability to record ordinary people in ordinary settings with an aural and visual clarity that can …

Hollywood will re-cut, delay, or undersell its films if it suspects they’ll pose economic or political risks, but it rarely shelves productions entirely. But unfortunately, this is exactly what it did with Samuel Fuller’s White Dog (1982), a movie about a canine trained to attack black people. Paramount has never domestically released the film outside of festivals, but the American Cinematheque screened it last night as part of its “Movies Not Available On Video” series. And Fuller’s film is a powerful, inspired critique of racism, tapping into the relationship between humans and animals in a way that places it within …

After extended runs in New York, Chicago, and London–among other places–Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) has finally opened in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque. Of course, this bit of irony is completely in tune with one of the documentary’s central theses, that despite being the host city for the film industry, Los Angeles–its people, places, and character–is virtually absent in the movies. Multimillion dollar productions by “tourist” directors, absurdly over-privileged and removed from the realities of the majority of Angelenos (less than 3% of whom actually work in the industry), continue to perpetuate myths about America’s second largest …

The UCLA Film and Television Archive is one of the nation’s premiere film restoration institutions, and they’re currently screening a series of restored films. Last night, they showed one of the most renowned of American independent films, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, completed in 1973 but unreleased until 1977. Burnett made it while he was a student at UCLA, shooting on 16mm with nonprofessional actors on weekends for an entire year, and edited it with a fine assembly of classic musical recordings.

Accordingly, music rights have kept it from being commercially released, making it a film that has been …

Classical narrative has dominated Hollywood commercial filmmaking for so long that it’s easy to grow a bit jaded toward it, particularly when best-selling screenwriting gurus promote plot structures by page numbers. (“Plot point one must occur within three pages of the 30-minute mark…”) But films that really know how to spin a good yarn, create memorable characters with complex shadings, utilize talented actors, and render novelistic stories are rare enough that they stand out like hand carved sculptures in a Wal-Mart store.

Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best of Youth attains its degree of accomplishment partially by allowing itself the luxury …