David Chute

Photo courtesy UCLA Filmand Television Archives It is no accident that the most interesting entries in the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s new retrospective "The Nature of Things: Graham Greene on Film," a panoramic survey of the distinctive, fictional terrain affectionately known as Greeneland, are the richly imagined genre films......

Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers is a triangular love story heated to the boiling point in an action-movie pressure cooker. The movie’s impossibly glamorous martial-arts heroes are inarticulate soldier-acrobats, locked into a game of undercover intrigue with a Chinese-box structure that keeps revealing deeper levels of deception and betrayal......

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Zhang Yimou discussed his two recent forays into the 700-year-old Chinese action genre known as wuxia (woo-shah) or "martial chivalry." L.A. WEEKLY: Your first wuxia movie, Hero, was seen as an apology for authoritarian rule. The target of assassination in the film, the......

In the latest Pixar extravaganza, The Incredibles, CGI digital animation seems finally to be settling into its proper niche somewhere between old-fashioned “analog” animation and live action. The vast mechanics of the hardware and software needed to produce such simulacra has by now become flexible and responsive enough to be......

After the first half-hour or so of most Takashi Miike movies, it is clear that we are not expected to experience it as a story unfolding seamlessly on its own. What we are asked to relish is the play of the writer-director’s imagination as it hops around from one notion......

The broad satirical comedy Where’s the Party Yaar?, about the assimilation anxieties of college-age NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) living in suburban Texas, is a minority movie with a mainstream sensibility. Distributed by its director and co-writer, Houston-area music producer and DJ Benny Mathews, it mixes the earnest multicultural sensitivity of Indo-American......

UCLA’s program notes for the current Film and Television Archive program, “Columbia Restorations: Westerns in the Age of Noir,” link the dark mood that overtook the American horse opera to the lingering effects of World War II on the American male psyche. And indeed, it seems obvious that the plight......

In the early 1990s, Johnnie To Kei-Fung (as old friends might introduce him) looked like the only producer in Hong Kong who was keeping the flames of innovation burning. A leading director of overproduced commercial action pictures like The Heroic Trio (1993), To may have seemed an odd choice for......

Certain movies seem calculated to divide audiences, as if the filmmakers relished the prospect of fistfights erupting in the lobby. Roger Avary‘s The Rules of Attraction, which opens this week, ups the ante by threatening to divide people against themselves. Alternately ravishing and repellent, and sometimes both at once, it......