Scott Foundas

The World is the title of the heartbreaking, staggeringly beautiful new film by the young Mainland Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke — no matter that most of the film’s characters are terminally landlocked. They’re employees at a tourist-trap theme park wherein one can traverse five continents in the span of a......

Had Henri Langlois not seen fit, in 1936, to co-found (with filmmaker Georges Franju) the Cinémathèque Française, no doubt someone else — or perhaps some government bureau — would have come along sooner or later and done the same. But would that someone have possessed Langlois’ unique blend of poetry,......

Two weekends ago, when Exorcist: The Beginning snuck its way into cinemas without benefit of advance press screenings, the irony was inescapable — an apparent loss of faith by Warner Bros. in a movie that purports to be about lost faith. But long before then, it was possible for filmgoers......

Photo by Melissa Moseley For those disposed to pay close attention to movie credits, the ones attached to the new thriller Suspect Zero should spark interest. For starters, the director is E. Elias Merhige, whose way-underground 1991 debut feature, Begotten, counted both Susan Sontag and Marilyn Manson (whose 1996 music......

Photo by Peter Mountain Consider a future where everyone speaks in a uniform tongue composed mostly of English but with bits of French, Spanish and Chinese mixed in like sprinkles on an ice cream sundae; where the world’s major cities have become overcrowded oases dotting an arid desert expanse; and......

Photo (top) by Gregory Bojorquez Richard Linklater is trying to program a TiVo. It’s just before 10 a.m., a couple of weeks before the opening of his latest film, Before Sunset. And as we sit in the boardroom of the Wilshire Boulevard offices of Linklater’s West Coast publicists, the native......

Though 2004 ostensibly marks its 10th anniversary, it could be argued that the Los Angeles Film Festival has only just turned 4, its birth (or rebirth) marked by a serendipitous moment in 2000 when the Independent Feature Project/Los Angeles entered into partnership with what was then called the Los Angeles......

Napoleon Dynamite is not just the title of director and co-writer Jared Hess’ debut feature, but also the name given to its lead character — a four-eyed beanpole of a teenager with an elastic-intensive wardrobe and a mass of unkempt reddish-blond curls that resembles the rubber top of a giant......

In Danish experimental and documentary filmmaker Jørgen Leth’s 1967 short subject The Perfect Human, a man (played by the deadpan fop Claus Nissen) and a woman (Maiken Algren) are alternately framed against a blank white canvas as the camera, and a dry, nature-film narration (voiced by Leth), scrupulously catalog their......