Scott Foundas

Photo by Ted Soqui Long before last Thursday, when he became the 2,288th person (and the first critic) to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Roger Ebert was already a veritable institution. His reviews, essays and interviews for the Chicago Sun-Times — models of journalistic lucidity and......

It may be that in the larger design of the universe this invasion . . . is not without its ultimate benefit for men; it has robbed us of that serene confidence in the future which is the most fruitful source of decadence. —H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds......

Though its action is largely confined to a few blocks of an unidentified American suburb, the spellbinding charm of performance artist Miranda July’s debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, is something universal. Children long to grow up, adults grasp at the lost innocence of youth, and all......

Produced piecemeal on a shoestring budget, George Romero’s debut feature, Night of the Living Dead (1968), was a fever dream of EC Comics and old Universal horror, crossbred with the fleet realism of the television newsreels Romero had once bicycled from a Pittsburgh film lab to local affiliates. The tightly......

Photo by A. Majoli/Magnum PhotosWhen Sally Potter’s Yes screens this week in the Los Angeles Film Festival, it will mark the end of a nine-month festival tour for the movie and its maker that began last Labor Day weekend in Telluride, Colorado. At that time, in a review published in......

For Laemmle and Landmark audiences weaned on the Iranian films — with their wise children, stunning landscapes and Russian-doll narratives — that began appearing here in the early 1990s, it may come as a surprise that the same Islamist republic known for its cinema of minimalist poetry and quiet resistence......

Photo by David JamesI’m guessing — and it’s strictly a hunch — that Christopher Nolan enjoyed a happier, better-adjusted childhood than Tim Burton’s. He seems to have spent more time outdoors, gone to bed at a more decent hour and, when he did bury himself in books, preferred Edgar Rice......

The characters of 27-year-old writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s debut feature, Funny Ha Ha — a gaggle of recently graduated Bostonian college students — express themselves in a generational vernacular that favors such willfully vague terms as “really,” “stuff” and “like.” Their behavior is prone to sudden impulsive gestures, like dropping a......

Photo by Jamie TruebloodThe young Skip Engblom, co-founder of Santa Monica’s Zephyr surf shop, is glimpsed only fleetingly in the archival material of Stacy Peralta’s 2002 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Most of the time, he’s represented by the 54-year-old version of Engblom interviewed by Peralta for the film. Now his......