Manohla Dargis

Photo by Tracy Bennett The title of the new film Ghost World comes from the graphic novel written and drawn by Daniel Clowes, a Bay Area–based artist with a knack for turning the seemingly ineffable into haunting cartoon images. Clowes gets loneliness down on paper the way Degas once did......

The fantastically original Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has no Western analogue, though he has professed an admiration for Tobe Hooper -- a kindred spirit of deep shivers and darker impulses. Born in 1955 -- and no relation to Akira, by blood or sensibility, much less to most of the other,......

The great science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once asked, in the title of a novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel, which eventually became the basis for the Ridley Scott thriller Blade Runner, explores the limits of human love and compassion in a future-tense world lacking in both......

The Princess and the Warrior and another Dolittle Princess Dolittle Princess, bernd spauke; Dolittle, bruce mcbroom The Princess and the Warrior, the new film from writer-director Tom Tykwer, begins with a gurgling tracheotomy and ends with a leap into the void. In between, there’s a convoluted robbery, an airborne toaster,......

Photo by Peter Sorel The Anniversary Party sounds like a lousy idea, like something cooked up by the bored or the underemployed. Shot on digital video, then transferred to film, it was written and directed by actors Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming, who also star as a married couple......

“We’re all tricksters,” said the old man, “and we‘re all here to survive.” Perched on a podium, flanked by actors and producers, shielded by bodyguards (a reminder of a pie-throwing incident years earlier), the 70-year-old Jean-Luc Godard had just provided the 54th Cannes film festival with one of its truest......

Photo by John P. Johnson True story: A famous writer I know shops a screenplay that features several female characters. As it turns out, “several” is a few too many for the liking of his male producer, who asks the writer to collapse them into one catchall woman. And, asks......

If you haven’t fled the theater 20 minutes into the new Mexican film Amores Perros, you’ll be hooked until the end. Pulsing with energy and wild style, it was directed by 37-year-old Alejandro González Iñárritu, a talented first-timer and former DJ who’s given his hometown of Mexico City a commercial......

As a labor-movement rallying cry, it’s pretty hard to beat “No Contracts, No Pussy!” Clearly, the strippers who fought to unionize San Francisco‘s Lusty Lady Theater in 1996 figured out early on that winning the right to collective bargaining would involve not just guts and patience, but some calculated street......

The young actress Noelle Evans needs a new agent, fast, and not just because you’ve never heard of her. Blond, stacked, good-looking in an ’80s, David Lee Roth music video sort of way and capable of line-reading clichés without a speck of self-consciousness, the actress has appeared in Hellraiser: Inferno......