F.x. Feeney

"THE MOST TERRIFYING FACT ABOUT THE UNIVERSE," said Stanley Kubrick in 1968, "is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent." It was a cold fact, he argued, we would be wise to face. For, "if we come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of......

Breed crows, warns a Spanish prisoner, and they'll pluck out your eyes. Nurturing one's own destruction may be a hobby known to all humanity, but it's a blood sport in Spain, whose tragic and comic forces unite in bullfights, flamenco, the civil war, the best jokes, the worst lovers' quarrels......

Photo by Merie W. WallaceFew films have been awaited with greater intensity than The Thin Red Line, and few have ever been greeted with ruder disappointment. To my mind, Terrence Malick's first film in 20 years is the finest he's made, as mature and ample a product of his sustained......

Near the end of John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur, as King Arthur makes ready for the apocalyptic battle in which he knows he will be killed, he tells his faithful knight Perceval, "I am the stuff of future memory." This may be my favorite line in all of Boorman’s work. Not......

Mention the Ten Commandments in Holly wood and people never think God, they think Cecil B. De Mille. Back in the early ’60s, when I was in Catholic school and supervising a classroom skit, the nun called out brightly: "Ready when you are, C.B.!" His very initials were so synonymous......

A cranky loner reluctantly assumes custody of a helpless, headstrong child, and together they make a journey that changes both their lives. If this isn’t the oldest story in movies, it’s close. Charlie Chaplin fathered the yarn in The Kid in 1921; through the ’50s and ’60s, Sam Fuller made......

One of my favorite moments in literature occurs in Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift, near the end of the first chapter. A poet, after a bruisingly lonesome day, finds himself strolling home in the company of a gifted rival. In the past, the men have been wary of each other, and......

Early in 1995, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg got together with a colleague he admired but had never met - Lars von Trier, who was about to make Breaking the Waves. The admiration was mutual: "Come on," said von Trier. "Let's make a commune." He meant this in the French sense......

Bruno Barreto's last film, Four Days in September (released in L.A. earlier this year), was a masterpiece - an unembellished account of a 1969 political kidnapping which managed to penetrate that difficult era with intelligence and heart. Barreto, a Brazilian, mapped his country's political life from the inside: Even the......