Sometimes people with multiple talents and predicates are left behind over one-quality people. This happens because multiple attention focuses divide the perception and awareness of qualities. With that said, if you have one talented person, and a beautiful and equally talented person, you tend to say the ugly one is more talented because there’s a […]
Any list of the twentieth century’s finest actors is incomplete without Alec Guinness. Yet it’s a name some might overlook because there was never anything remotely showy — or even particularly magnetic — about him. More than anything, Guinness relished the process of submerging himself completely in a role, disappearing into the characters he played. […]
Named by the British Film Institute as one of the fifty greatest movies of all time, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 science fiction masterpiece called Stalker is, among many other things, a one-of-a-kind filmwatching experience. Enough ink has already been spilt here on C&B on the importance of Tarkovsky for the European and world cinema, as well […]
Roger Ebert was widely regarded as one of the most prolific and influential film critics of all time. As the first film critic to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the first critic to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame his contribution to both the art of film criticism and the […]
Cinema in the early years of the 21st Century has experienced something of an existential crisis. Terms such as ‘TV-like’ or ‘television-esque’ were once intended as insults; now, in a period most commentators consider a new ‘golden age of television’ – a Don Draper here, a Walter White there – that is no longer the […]
The New Hollywood wave may be the most significant film movement in the history of American cinema. The classic era of Hollywood was built on vertical integration, meaning that the film studios controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of every movie they made, until the United States v Paramount Pictures Case forced the studios to […]
Michael Cimino’s last feature, “The Sunchaser,” was released in 1996, twenty years before his death, on July 2nd, at the age of seventy-seven. His first film, “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot,” came out in 1974. In the seven features made during his all-too-brief directorial career, a certain kind of male character recurs. The Cimino Man is strong-willed and […]
Jean-Luc Godard had a problem with endings. His early films often finish with a throwaway closure, a death, not quite real, distantly presented. His films are all middle, yet a sense of ending imbues them. For Godard, even love itself is something that is always winding down and his lover, his wife, the muse of […]