I'm beyond thrilled to say that I'm featured in the Summer 2019 issue of Gagosian Quarterly, the magazine of the art gallery. I write about the cinema of the incomparable Italian director/poet/thinker Pier Paolo Pasolini—specifically, the beautiful faces that filled his screen from Accattone (1961) to Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Pasolini is the subject of an comprehensive retrospective at the Metrograph Theater in the Lower East Side, NYC, from May to July 2019. I've been working…

New essay in MUBI's Notebook on the films of Jim Jarmusch + three big items for him: Drift, Repetition, Allusion. Check it out. I was sparked to write it after a retrospective of his films played recently at New York City's Metrograph cinema. Here's an excerpt from the fourth part of the essay (which is divided into five segments à la Night on Earth):

"Music binds together all the lives of Jarmusch’s foreigners. Songs from Public Enemy, Elvis Presley, and…

I had one of the most exciting encounters at a movie theater EVER yesterday, so bear with me.

Yesterday, I re-watched It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (Bland-ley Kramer, 1963) in glorious 70mm at LACMA! It's gotten a lot of hate around these parts for being cataclysmically unfunny. And while I can see why people would think so (Kramer has an awful eye for comedic direction, and the sheer pomposity of his statement that he would make "the comedy…

No, Tarantino. This is the last straw. You've gone too far, and you've proven your detractors right: you are only in it for the bloody money. (Emphasis on blood.) I've been willing to defend QT's oeuvre for a long time now, but if I want to maintain a responsible and self-respecting conscience, I have no choice but to renounce him. Despite his desire to be cinema's VC Barnum by way of a crimsony Jackson Pollock, QT has maintained an infrequent…