Scott Foundas

A train pulls into a station, the whistle blows and a man disembarks. The year is 1946, a decade since he last wandered these familiar streets, and in that time a war has come and gone, leaving behind scarred husks of once-grand buildings. The man, whose name is Zhichen (Xin......

Sometimes you travel halfway around the world only to find yourself right in your own back yard. So it was that, after the better part of a day spent flying to Argentina, where I had been invited to join a jury at the Sixth Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent......

Photo by Mary Sue Gordon 1) That for lack of an actual film to remake, Hollywood’s fallback position is to concoct a hybrid cannibalization of not one, but several, past successes — in this case, Big, Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married and It’s a Wonderful Life. 2)......

Under the opening titles of director Nick Willing’s occasionally engaging, if undeniably tawdry, thriller Close Your Eyes, a young girl in a nightgown is pursued by an unidentified assailant through a bleak industrial landscape before jumping from a train trestle and plunging into a chilly ravine. This same girl, we......

The paradox of being Philip Kaufman — nine of whose 12 feature films are the subject of a retrospective at the American Cinematheque this week — is that you can be considered one of Hollywood’s finest directors, yet find yourself more likely to receive tribute than get hired to make......

From Shakespeare (William) to Schwartz (Josh), popular dramatists can’t resist prying open the chest of tempestuous teenage emotions and fiddling around. (I even once saw some Egyptian hieroglyphics that told a story of young people not quite fitting in, feeling trapped and having parents who just don’t understand.) In Luke......

Photo by Kim Tae-Hwan and Lee Sung-Jin The title of Kim Ki-Duk’s Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring denotes the passage of time not just in nature but in the lives of its two main characters, a wise old Buddhist monk (Oh Young-Soo) and his apprentice, played......

Presented in nine chapters and a prologue, all set to the grandfatherly drawl of John Hurt’s storybook narration, Lars von Trier’s Dogville is a postmodern morality play stripped nearly bare by its precocious creator, until only its boldness, cutting insight, intermittent hilarity and bracing violence remain. It is also, not......

“China has a shortage of everything but people,” chortles the boss of a questionably legal coal-mining operation midway through Li Yang’s Blind Shaft. But maybe not for long, he should add — at least not if itinerant miners Tang (Wang Shuangbao) and Song (Li Yixiang) have their way about it......

Photo by Lorey Sebastian Like one of his own fast-talking con-artist protagonists, playwright-turned-filmmaker David Mamet has never been prone to modesty. In his 2000 feature State and Main, he depicted the members of a film crew on location in a tiny New England hamlet as a uniformly boorish, idiotic bunch......