Category: Film review

“I had some trepidation about coming to Pasadena,” explained Christian McKay in last Sunday’s Q&A at the Laemmle Playhouse following Me and Orson Welles, in which he brilliantly portrays the famed cineaste. He noted The Magnificent Ambersons was test screened at the historic Pasadena Playhouse across the street, where 50 percent of the audience loved it (“I’ve seen the response cards”) and the other fifty percent hated it, thus prompting RKO to butcher one of the most elegant films in American history. McKay seemed to impress everyone at the Q&A, however, as much for his Welles knowledge as his …

A couple of weeks ago, LACMA screened new prints of Sergei Eisenstein’s last film, Ivan the Terrible, parts I and II.  I hadn’t seen it in years, so it was a special delight to view its baroque excess on the big screen.  The film has been criticized for its pictorial bombast and lack of the kind of “dialectical montage” that made Eisenstein esteemed around the world; in his entry in Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Noël Burch grumbles, “the straightforwardness of the montage . . . underlines the kinship between this film and the most archaic …

Andrei Tarkovsky has achieved an unusually devoted following (even among film cultists) enticed by his public persona, which championed aesthetic perfection as a kind of mystical calling.  It’s easy to reach into introspection when parsing his films, as two new documentaries demonstrate by adopting personal lenses to frame the way the filmmaker shaped his work on and off camera.  Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (screening at the Lincoln Center as part of a Tarkovsky retrospective beginning today) is an essay film by Los Angeles filmmaker Dmitry Trakovsky that explores Tarkovsky’s legacy through interviews with the filmmaker’s colleagues and admirers.  Rerberg and Tarkovsky: …

A cemetery mound initiates a conical motif in Oshima’s Boy.

The new retrospective of Nagisa Oshima–widely regarded among experts as the most important filmmaker of the Japanese New Wave–is currently poised between its Los Angeles hosts, the American Cinematheque and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; LACMA begins its half of the series tonight with two masterpieces: Death By Hanging (1968) and Boy (1969).  Both films showcase Oshima’s ferocious sociopolitical edge and preoccupation with the interplay of fantasy and reality, as well as his stylistic diversity: the former is a black-and-white melange of Bretchian techniques and mobile camerawork …