F.x. Feeney

It‘s night, heaven knows where, and we’re looking out through the dusty, harshly illuminated windowpane of a rickety bus. The opaque glass is smirched with a jot of mustard-yellow paint that appears to have perished halfway up the slope to becoming a word in Sanskrit. Neil Diamond music (“Holly Ho-ly”)......

Is celebrity fate? This is a question that never bothered Aristotle, but it’s put a huge dent in the collective psyche of our century. Writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze stand the Greek notion of character equaling destiny quite literally on its head in Being John Malkovich, a mad,......

In March 1957, while preparing Paths of Glory, the 28-year-old Stanley Kubrick explored an empty sound stage at Geiselgasteig Studios in Bavaria, picked up the battered remnant of an abandoned set and was startled to find scribbled on its flip side, “Max Ophuls, Lola Montes.” It was a moment of......

Early in Guinevere, written and directed by Audrey Wells, there is a gesture so romantic that it understandably propels the love story that follows. A shy ingenue, Harper, played by Sarah Polley, receives a photo taken of her on the sly by Connie, a charmingly disheveled, middle-aged photographer played by......

Photo by Claudette BariusBACK IN THE 1950s, EVERYBODY FROM LEADERS IN Congress to the nuns at my parochial school warned that comic books would be the ruin of civilization. They were living in fear, the occupational hazard of authority figures, blind and deaf to what we instinctively knew but were......

Photo by Kevin Langdon AckermanSILHOUETTES EMERGE FROM THE SUNLIT FOG one Monday morning and enter a dilapidated, eerily official-looking building. "You have just died," they're told. This place they've entered is a way station between life and their eternal destination, and their task over the course of the coming week......

ONE OF THE DEADLIEST CONCEPTS IN American life is the panel discussion, but then again, that may be because so few panelists in the universe of chat are either passionate or articulate. This, as I see it, is the primary lesson of the recent "Words Into Pictures," a conference organized......

HE'D SEEN HIS THOUSANDTH SMALL BOY and was in despair. Theo Angelopoulos, the Greek film director best known in this country for Ulysses' Gaze (1995), was trying to cast the role of a young Albanian refugee in his new film, Eternity and a Day, which won the Palme d'Or at......

Photo by Peter StoneTIME STANDS STILL IN TONY BUI'S THREE SEASONS, and the feeling is so right that the film as a whole evokes Robert Frost's definition of a good poem: "A momentary stay against confusion." The place is present-day Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, despite the massive......

A MAN STANDS BESIDE A DESERT HIGHWAY WITH his thumb out. He's an ambitious dreamer, a musician hitchhiking west to join his fiancée. He accepts a ride and, in a moment of astonishing bad luck, becomes answerable for the death of a stranger who picks him up. He's innocent but......