Reviewed for Cinefile.info:

A TALE OF WINTER is the second film that Éric Rohmer made in his “Tales of the Four Seasons” series — the third and final of his major film cycles, after “Six Moral Tales” and “Comedies and Proverbs” — but, thematically and according to the narrative’s placement within the calendar year, it feels like the true end point to the series. (For the record, the films can be enjoyed when seen in any order.) It is also…

Welcome to New York, Abel Ferrara’s thinly disguised dramatization of the Dominique Strauss Kahn scandal starring Gerard Depardieu and Jacqueline Bisset, was predictably a lightning rod for controversy when it premiered in 2014. The film begins with a series of debauched sexual encounters (let’s just say that champagne and ice cream are put to creative use) between Depardieu’s “Mr. Devereaux,” an international financial bigwig, and hired prostitutes — before culminating in a recreation of Kahn’s alleged sexual assault of a…

The late Chilean director Raul Ruiz’s indispensable book Poetics of Cinema argues against the necessity of “central conflict theory” that has long dominated commercial narrative filmmaking in the western world. If Abbas Kiarostami, one of the world’s greatest living directors, ever wrote a comparable book on film theory, one suspects he might similarly challenge the notion of the “three-act structure.” The Japanese-set Like Someone in Love may well be the Iranian master’s most provocative work; his extremely unconventional handling of…

True story: I convinced my mother to take me to see this at the Manor Theatre in Charlotte, NC in the fall of 1990 when I was just 15-years-old (I had to be accompanied by a parent because it was an R-rated movie). My mom, a fairly conservative, southern, Christian woman, had never seen a David Lynch movie before but she vaguely knew him as the creator of TWIN PEAKS, a new television show that my younger brother and I…