David Chute

When, if ever, will it be okay to have fun again? Someday, but perhaps not yet, suggested Mona, a young Syrian Muslim who had traveled from the city of Orange to the Sports Arena on September 23 to join other fans of Indian ”Bollywood“ cinema at a mammoth public-appearance event......

Scott McGehee and David Siegel have made only two movies, and people think they‘ve got them pegged. They seem to exert a lot of energy fending off false impressions. Just because their stylized films tell tangled tales of crime and betrayal, they insist, doesn’t mean they should be typed as......

Tucked into the final weekend of the Los Angeles Film Festival is a miniprogram of three topnotch Asian features and a short -- a luxury hors d’oeuvre to an epic retrospective of martial-arts films that the UCLA Film and Television Archive will present next year. The archive‘s programmer, Cheng Sim-Lim,......

For a fair number of people, Wong Kar-Wai is Hong Kong cinema, the only contemporary filmmaker from that city-state who has become a brand name on the international film-festival and art-house circuit. And he is not without honor in his hometown. His elusive, fragmented, fetishistically accessorized character studies, embellished with......

The Nuart has been on the side of the Asian angels almost from the beginning, having mounted the first of its successful Festival Hong Kong programs way back in December of 1992. In the meantime, however, the circumstances of Asian-movie exhibition have shifted pretty drastically, and the Nuart just isn‘t......

When director Im Kwon-Taek is referred to as the Akira Kurosawa of Korea, the comparison often has less to do with the style or the content of his films than with his nearly imperial status in his native land. One of his pictures, Sopyonje, has eclipsed everything else in the......

”Imagine you’re an actor putting on a corset,“ says James Schamus, co-writer and executive producer of Ang Lee‘s martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s ”a heavy canvas corset with a bunch of metal cables attached, and you‘re getting strung 75 feet up in the air while hanging from a......

What can film, a medium whose tools are mostly sensuous and exterior, hope to make of processes that are nothing but subtle shifts of outlook or understanding? Yet those deep tremors have been conveyed visually, most often in foreign films: Robert Bresson’s 1950 Diary of a Country Priest is a......

There are a lot of fake tough guys in Hollywood. Probably you‘ve met a few, or seen them posturing on talk shows. This fellow Oscar Boetticher Jr., better known as Budd, is the real article: Posturing would be beneath him. He was a hard-charging high school and college athlete. He......

Marc Shaiman firmly resists the suggestion that he leads a double life as a film composer and lyricist. At first blush, though, the two strains of his flourishing career are hard to reconcile. On the one hand, he is the gifted subversive who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated anthem ”Blame Canada“ for......