David Chute

law logo2x b

Ram Gopal Varma and Company: Indian Goodfellas

David Chute
For the American Cinematheque, which has found a large audience for “Asian extreme” action and horror films, the work of the energetic Indian action specialist Ram Gopal Varma seems a good fit. Varma has had major commercial hits at home, including the terrific Aamir Khan vehicle Rangeela (Colorful) in 1995......
Sometimes she feels like a husbandless child. (20th Century Fox)

Soapy Water

David Chute
The Indian-Canadian writer-director Deepa Mehta, whose last film was the misfired cross-cultural parody Bollywood/Hollywood, displays a far richer understanding of the cinema of her native land in Water, which hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest. Racing to catch......
John Patterson

4th Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles

David Chute
Just 4 years old, the IFFLA has rapidly emerged as one of the city’s best annual movie showcases. This is to a great extent because it draws so intelligently on the full breadth and depth of one of the richest movie industries on Earth, from the world-class gloss of commercial......
The Blackbird

Lon Chaney — Tod Browning: The Unholy Two

David Chute
Between them, Lon Chaney and Tod Browning made nearly 300 movies, almost all of them in the silent era. And in the eight thrillers they made together, the shape-shifting star of The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and the director of Freaks (1932) created a uniquely twisted form of masochistic......

Japanese Outlaw Masters

David Chute
One of the best things about the American Cinematheque’s Japanese Outlaw Masters series is that its concept has never become rigid or limiting. It has something in common with Manny Farber’s notion of “termite art,” emphasizing commercial filmmakers in disrespected genres who take advantage of their comparative anonymity in order......

Diamonds in the Rough

David Chute
Of 21,000 feature films made in America before 1950, nearly half have been lost. Most of silent cinema has been obliterated. And the crisis is global: Of 500 movies produced in Hong Kong before 1947, only four are known to survive. In Italy, 90 percent of silent and 50 percent......

Old Dudes Kicking Ass

David Chute
Photos by Saeed AdyaniThe durability of the Chinese martial-arts culture is embodied in Kung Fu Hustle by the visible sturdiness of a supporting cast of spry if superannuated martial artists who occupy the movie’s magical tenement-housing block. Most of these roles are played by veteran Hong Kong film performers, journeymen......

Not-So-Hidden Master

David Chute
Photos by Saeed AdyaniThe word “homage” is hardly ever used these days without a sneer. We infer pretension, thinly disguised plagiarism, lack of imagination, or all three at once. In this context it can be hard to know what to make of a film that restores to the concept of......

Dangerous Games

David Chute
From the opening shots of Bahman Ghobadi’s visionary Turtles Can Fly — his third dramatic feature, after A Time for Drunken Horses (2000) and Marooned in Iraq (2002) — it is apparent that we are in the hands of a master. His images have an instantly readable, almost surreal graphic......

Elbows of Fury

David Chute
Every iconic image and snazzy film-school editing trick in Prachya Pinkaew’s fierce, playful Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior has been designed with exactly one thing in mind: making a movie star out the wiry Thai kickboxing prodigy Tony Jaa. But this director is no chopsocky primitive. Pinkaew is a flashy young......