Mike D'Angelo

Most movies try to speedily establish a baseline for what constitutes "normal" within a particular world, then get busy fucking things up. Polish-French filmmaker Andrzej Zulawski, whose career retrospective continues at Cinefamily through the end of March (following a weeklong run of Possession, his most notorious work), doesn't have the......

Turns out the title of Gerardo Naranjo's previous film, I'm Gonna Explode, was meant to prepare us for this kinetic stunner. Ostensibly an unflinching portrait of Mexico's brutal drug cartels, Miss Bala follows the increasingly nightmarish journey of Laura (Stephanie Sigman), an aspiring beauty queen gunning for Miss Baja. (The......

Plenty of notable filmmakers have crossed over from fiction to documentary, or vice versa. Some — Scorsese, Varda, Demme — could even make a legitimate claim of being bi, having moved back and forth between the two for their entire careers. Only Werner Herzog, however, has amassed a truly legendary......

Deciding what the hell to do with Ingmar Bergman tends to be one of the budding cinephile's first truly daunting rites of passage. Two common paths exist, neither of them especially productive. The first, taken a bit less frequently these days, amounts to blind idolatry, with Bergman as the One......

Asked to describe The Rules of the Game to an indecisive cowboy in the Coen brothers' hilarious short World Cinema (look for it on YouTube), a movie-theater cashier — a prototypical movie nerd in both manner and appearance — can't help but gush. "That may be Jean Renoir's greatest film......