Films are difficult to make. Even the simplest production is at the mercy of a million things that could potentially go wrong. If the film you happen to have in mind is a unique, artistic epic, then you should expect the difficulties to be comparatively monumental and bizarre. Recently I had the pleasure of watching … Continue reading
More than anything else A Most Wanted Man is a master class in suspense. Like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy before it, this adaptation of a John le Carré novel revels in its own fascination with the world of international espionage. Set in present-day Hamburg, it traces the movements of a specialist German anti-terrorism unit, which … Continue reading
The fact that David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars and Olivier Assayas’ Cloud of Sils Maria are out at the same time can be read either as serendipitous or as a symptom of our compulsively self-reflexive times. Either way, both are films about making films, about the vagaries and obsessions and discontents of Hollywood and superstardom. And that … Continue reading
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s extraordinary 1978 film Despair was recently re-released at the EYE Cinema and Film Museum. The script was adapted by the British playwright Tom Stoppard from a Russian Vladimir Nabokov novel published in English under the same name, so one goes into Despair expecting cerebral stuff, and the film does not disappoint. Despair does a remarkable job of visualizing … Continue reading
Amsterdam Film 