I'm feeling a bit silly and regretful. If I had my Pasolini watch-through to do over again, I never would have let myself get knocked off course by the impenetrability of his Medea, which made me back up, read the play, and then watch the...
For the 100th anniversary of Ingrid Bergman's birth—my 100th blog post. Thanks to all my readers and for all the positive feedback I've received in the past three years. I just re-upped with my hosting service so I guess you're in for another year of...
The BFI's new box set, released April 20 of this year, was a blind buy for me—I hadn't seen any of the four Dreyer masterworks featured. I came to these films via the same route that I suppose most do: blown away by The Passion...
Film disc collectors often talk guiltily, or regretfully, or occasionally scornfully, about "double-dipping"—buying a new Blu-ray edition of a film previously purchased on DVD or on an inferior Blu-ray. But if there was ever a case for it (as well as for owning a multi-region player),...
I'm used to thinking of the category "spaghetti westerns" as a fairly inexhaustible pool of films, so I was rather surprised when it clicked with me recently that the entire Sergio Leone oeuvre is comprised of just six mature films. Long ones, to be sure,...
In the Decameron I filmed the way I know how: more than ever in my own style. But while in Porcile and Medea my game was atrocity, now strangely it's happiness. A happy work (made with great seriousness, of course) seems to me to contradict...
I'm not really sure why it took me so long to get around to Fellini's 1973 classic—his 4th and final winner of the best foreign language film Oscar—but I'm glad I finally did. Amarcord feels like a film that everyone ought to be able to...
As a result of my recent, intense encounter with the films of Roberto Rossellini, I'm thinking a lot lately about the possibilities entailed in breaking style conventions not simply for innovation's sake but in the name of moving past the limits of style itself. Such...
In case it wasn't obvious from my last post, I seem to have a new addiction and it's the films of Roberto Rossellini. At the moment the more formalist auteurs seem like weaksauce to me compared to the way that Rossellini challenges and reconsiders formal...
A ball started rolling for me when I saw that restored print of Rome, Open City at TIFF in September. It was the first Rossellini film that I'd ever seen and I found it simply devastating —a much more harrowing, yet illuminating, emotional experience than...