The Coen Brothers are the closest thing we have to existentialist filmmakers working today.
Before you dismiss this out of hand, consider the following. The Man Who Wasn’t There, probably their most underrated film, is essentially an adaptation of Albert Camus’ “The Stranger” (at least as much as A Serious Man is a retelling of The Book of Job).
This past Sunday was “Community Day” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), marking most people’s first opportunity to take a look inside the newly redesigned space on downtown Berkeley’s Center Street. It’s been years in the making – the previous location opened in 1964 but was shuttered at the end of 2014, due to seismic concerns – and hundreds turned out to see what rock star design firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro (and $112 million in privately raised funds) had come up with.
Netflix’s recommendations have long been a source of amusement and morbid curiosity, deploying complex algorithms (or possibly just straight-up sales pitches) to come to unlikely conclusions about your personal preferences.
Did you enjoy the “cerebral, imaginative” World of Tomorrow? Why not check out its obvious spiritual prequel … Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining!
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. After the shocking and seemingly sudden passing of David Bowie — one of our greatest, weirdest, and universally beloved artists — the great Alan Rickman went and died last Thursday. It’s a terrible loss.
Part of an ongoing effort to watch a set of films from non-White, non-U.S., non-male, and/or non-straight filmmakers and depart a little from the Western canon. The intro and full list can be found here.
The narrative of “The Dancing Girl of Izu” is apparently a familiar one in Japan.
I’ve already covered my favorite films that came out in 2015. But that is only half the story. First-watches are at least as important, and probably more so.
Here are some of the films that meant the most to me that I saw this year, regardless of when they came out.
It’s a truism that top 10 lists are fundamentally a silly endeavor.
There’s no inherent value, and maybe even a whiff of distaste, to ranking anything, but it’s also, let’s face it, kind of fun. And year-end lists also provide markers, for ourselves and others, of what we enjoyed at a certain moment in time, and hopefully a bit about why.
Jason Zeldes’ directorial debut Romeo Is Bleeding is one of the year’s best and most powerful films.
The film deftly tells multiple stories. The story of poet Donté Clark, the story of kids countering violence with art, the story of Richmond, California.
Back in May of this year, I caught Romeo Is Bleeding at the SF International Film Fest. At the time, it was not only my favorite documentary of the year, but my favorite film of any genre I’ve seen in a theater in 2015.
Back on the late, lamented film site The Dissolve, national treasure Nathan Rabin had an ongoing column called “You Might Also Like”, which used the various internet algorithms that recommend one movie on the basis of another to investigate whether one would, in fact, also like the second movie.