John Patterson

Think of Danish filmmaking, and chances are the first thing that comes to mind is the faintly facetious Dogme manifesto, which calls on directors to follow a “vow of chastity” -- no artificial light, no constructed sets, no asynchronous sound, etc. While the whole idea of a manifesto now looks......

Historians tend to depict postwar European film as a series of stylistic schools and national movements, parricidal revolutions and degree-zero cultural rebirths, each urged on by sympathetic house journals like Cahiers du Cinema and Filmkritik, and by calls to arms like 1962‘s Oberhausen Manifesto, which imagined a New German Cinema......

”We eat, we shit, we fuck, we die,“ says the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) at one point in Philip Kaufman‘s Quills, outlining his vision of the downward spiral of pointlessness that draws us inexorably from the womb to the tomb. Later in the movie, once the unbridled licentiousness of......

Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature, Ratcatcher, is the kind of movie that will really sort out the sheep from the goats among its potential audience. It’s bleak — boy, is it bleak. It depicts people, particularly children, living in misery, poverty and profound psychological distress. It unfolds in the dark vale......

The central image of Clint Eastwood‘s Space Cowboys is a shot of four saggy backsides. They belong to Clint (age 70), James Garner (72), Donald Sutherland (66) and Tommy Lee Jones (53). Or if you prefer to linger in the past, they belong to Rowdy Yates, Brett Maverick, Hawkeye Pierce......

The Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s, subject of the American Cinematheque’s marvelous retrospective, ”Celebrating the New Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s,“ is the forbidding monolith against which today‘s filmmakers must dash their heads in order to prove themselves. The period looms large in the collective folk memory of today’s......

Where the Heart Is is Natalie Portman’s coming-out ball, her debutante movie. The little girl on whom all eyes have focused since Luc Besson’s The Professional and Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls is all grown up and ready for her white gown, corsage and close-up. Until now, Portman has been like......

DiCaprio finds trouble in Paradise Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Alex Garland‘s novel The Beach is borne into theaters on a tidal wave of impossibly heightened expectations. It has to please at least three distinct moviegoing constituencies -- fans of Leonardo DiCaprio, of Boyle’s Trainspotting and of Garland -- whose members......

There is a map of Southern California drawn up in 1925 by Paramount Studios to illustrate the variety of locations available to filmmakers throughout the region. It‘s disorienting indeed, like one of those post-card maps of America that shows only places like Manhattan, Tennessee, and Brooklyn, Texas. On it, the......