Give me a brain – The cinema of the brain and the question of death (Kubrick, Resnais) – The two fundamental changes from the cerebral point of view – The black or white screen, irrational cuts and relinkings – Fourth aspect of experimental cinema
Since the recognized success of Dr. Strangelove, objections to Kubrick’s obscurity, his enigmatic mind, his bleak view of man, his simplistic view of life, his boring mannerisms abound in the reviews of his films. Barry Lyndon seems destined to encourage the same ambivalent critical reaction.
Pasolini nel girare Accattone, metteva le mani in una ferita aperta nella pseudo-coscienza borghese, quella dell’esistenza di due Italie, una ufficiale, l’Italia da esportazione, onesta, né povera né ricca ma allegra e sincera, e un’Italia miserrima, in cui tutto, dalla lingua ai codici morali, era fermo ad un passato mai risolto di carognesca vitalità senza scampo.
Raccolta di estratti tratti da interviste e articoli in cui Pier Paolo Pasolini esprime opinioni sul cinema.
What could be a more appropriate subject for a 1973 movie than the ordeal of Frank Serpico, the New York City policeman who became a pariah in the Department because he wouldn’t take bribes? Serpico, whose incorruptibility alienates him from his fellow-officers and turns him into a messianic hippie freak, is a perfect modern-movie hero.
A film like The Lord of the Rings is a starting place as much as an end product of adaptation: just one reference point in a matrix of intertextual relations created by synergic cross-promotion. Video games, graphic and literary novelizations, CD soundtracks, multiple Director’s Cuts and DVD versions, prequels, sequels, and franchises not only extend the boundaries of contemporary Hollywood fantasy films but also increasingly determine their form and narrative.
Accattone può essere visto anche, in laboratorio, come il prelievo di un modo di vita, cioè di una cultura. Se visto così, può essere un fenomeno interessante per un ricercatore, ma è un fenomeno tragico per chi ne è direttamente interessato: per esempio per me, che ne sono l’autore.
This film tells the story of Bill Cosby’s rise to fame, fall from grace, and the allegations concerning the rape and assault charges.
Bonnie and Clyde is about violence and crime, and the desire of the ego to define itself, to live in violence and crime if it can’t in anything else. To this end it remains properly sympathetic to the characters it has plucked from history, the sympathy being given not to crime but to a process in which crime figures, to the action by which the ego displays itself as the embattled source of everything—crime, love, violence, goodness, error, dream.
The movies that split people down the middle, put in the Empire dock… Simon Ingram (Prosecution) and Kat Brown (Defence) on Steven Speilberg’s “A. I.: Artificial Intelligence”
The Servant is a genuinely shocking experience for audiences with the imagination to understand the dimensions of the shock. In years to come The Servant may be cited as a prophetic work making the decline and fall of our last cherished illusions about ourselves and our alleged civilization.
2001: A Space Odyssey is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines, and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans. For all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, this is a kind of space-Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story.
With images obtained during an investigation carried out in fifty eight slaughterhouses in Mexico between 2015 and 2017, «Slaughterhouse» is a documentary that takes us into the hermetic world of the meat industry.
In Leone’s hands, capitalism itself becomes a mythic force, as much a part of the landscape (it’s embodied here by the building of a railroad across the desert) as the horses or mountain ranges. In criticizing the myth — in filling in the economic relationships American westerns have skipped over —Leone expands and enriches it, which is what the best criticism does.
The scene “Who Threw that Stone?” from the 1979 movie “Life of Brian” is a classic example of Monty Python’s irreverent humor.
The adventures of the great comedian Charlie Chaplin, told by himself. Published on Photoplay Magazine, January 1922 issue
Empire Contributing Editor Chris Hewitt virtually stalked Frank Darabont across the globe for this piece, from the director’s LA office to the set of The Mist, where he spent three days watching him at work.
During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, the CIA mounted a covert plan to free six American diplomats in Tehran. The cover story was that a production company was about to shoot a massive sci-fi movie called Argo in the Iranian desert. This is the incredible story of the film that never was…
This movie has had the bad judgment to turn Robin Williams into a role model. Good Morning, Vietnam takes a real culture hero and turns him into a false one.
The Killing Fields, which is based on Sydney Schanberg’s 1980 Times Magazine article “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” is by no means a negligible movie. It shows us the Khmer Rouge transforming Cambodia into a nationwide gulag, and the scenes of this genocidal revolution have the breadth and terror of something deeply imagined.
Will Blow-Up be taken seriously in 1968 only by the same sort of cultural diehards who are still sending out five-page single-spaced letters on their interpretation of Marienbad?
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