John Patterson

Just try crunching the numbers. In a career — a one-man Kulturkampf, more like — that lasted only 13 years, from 1969 until his death in 1982 at age 37, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced a staggering 43 feature-length works for the cinema and television. He made the first......

SALVATION, DAMNATION, ATONEMENT, GRACE: These are the options available to the often faithless denizens of that territory known as Greeneland, a zone in which no good deed is unsalted by bad motives, and where evil acts may yet secure one a seat at God's right hand. Just as Graham Greene's......

Fond of austerity and suspicious of success, British director Mike Leigh tends to retrench after his hits. Life Is Sweet (1990), the first of his films to register in the U.S., was followed, in 1993, by the blisteringly raw one-man show Naked -- which, three years later, was in turn......

Bloody Sunday and The Grey Zone both pitch themselves headlong into seething debates about the meaning of historical atrocities, and the propriety of re-enacting them. The former, writer-director Paul Greengrass’ hyperrealist re-creation of the 1972 massacre, by soldiers of the British Army‘s Paratroop Regiment, of 14 unarmed Catholic civil rights......

If you keep only half an eye on the state of contemporary French cinema, you might be forgiven for thinking that the children of Renoir, Bresson and Godard have all lately forged some unholy alliance with the sweat-soaked, lubed-up toilers in Europe‘s porn industry. The edifying delights that this trend......

His face has never been his fortune and that‘s a good thing, because Ron Jeremy is not what you’d call conventionally handsome. Short, comically hairy, gnomically rotund, and fully deserving of his nickname “the Hedgehog,” he seems an unlikely candidate for porn superstardom. Indeed, his prominence has less to do......

When British-born director Donald Cammell put a gun to his head in 1996, it seemed like death was imitating art. By some quirk of fate or ballistics, the bullet lodged in his skull causing no pain, and for an hour the 62-year-old Cammell was able to talk lucidly with his......

British director Ken Loach, a man who would rather be trading class-war stories with Chilean socialists, Spanish Civil War veterans or battle-scarred Sandinistas than lunching with Jeffrey Katzenberg any day, has made his L.A. movie at last. And those who know his work won’t be surprised that the action takes......

While Traffic has made a serious contribution to the nation’s War on Drugs debate, Ted Demme‘s new movie, Blow, starring Johnny Depp, makes the case for drugs as America’s favorite national pastime, food for the questing, pioneering American head. Like Traffic, the film examines the drug business from top to......

Photo by Photofest “British New Wave” — now there’s a term that badly needs redefining. Just how “British” was the kitchen-sink boom of the late 1950s and early ’60s — and just how “new”? The Nuart’s selection of gritty, working-class dramas summarizes the main clichés of the genre, which was......