Category: Texts

One of the freelancing hats I wear these days is graphic design for the California Institute of Technology’s award-winning Engineering & Science magazine, and its latest issue contains a really fascinating article on the Netflix Prize contest (2006-’09) that awarded a million dollars to the person/team who best improved the company’s algorithm for predicting its user ratings.

I’m sure most readers here have received their fair share of movie predictions from any number of websites, ranging from the accurate to the absurd. A few months ago, Amazon.com actually sent me this email: “As someone who has purchased or rated The …

I’m very proud to announce the September publication of Bert Cardullo’s Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, which includes two pieces that I wrote. You can pre-order and preview the book at Amazon or at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who describe it as “the first book in English to treat the work of the Dardennes, [which] features the best essays and interviews (supplemented by a chronology, a filmography, film credits, and a bibliography) published to date on the two brothers’ memorable films.”

Cardullo is a longtime critic and scholar currently teaching in Izmar, …

La Promesse

I was asked to contribute a chapter in a new book from Cambridge Scholars Publishing in the UK, Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, edited by Kenneth R. Morefield. Faith and spirituality are large and ambiguous topics, of course, but they’re frequently reduced to marketing terms for niche publishing groups, something I have no interest in perpetuating. Fortunately the chapters I’ve read in the book (including standout essays by Darren Hughes and John Caruana) feature philosophically and aesthetically informed analysis with a universal readership in mind.

Given how often the word “spiritual” is used …