In the mid-1990s Darren Aronofsky wrote a list of ten movies he hoped to one day pursue. His first six, from Pi to Noah, all came from it. (No one seems to kno...
Is reinvention overrated? For at least 45 minutes, Athena (named for the fictional area where the film is based as well as the goddess of wisdom and war) threa...
There is a paradox at the heart of Master Gardener. In their respective worlds—one of abstinence and iconography; the other of money and risk—priests and gambl...
This year’s Venice Film Festival competition has not been short on bloat. Todd Field, Noah Baumbach, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu all turned in sprawling works th...
At the end of the 1970s, while working as a bat boy for the Portland Mavericks, Todd Field had a bright idea: why not make a stringy-shaped gum (call it Big Le...
“These three films, they're all masterful. They're extraordinary films, and they're actually quite different.” It’s mid-July in Switzerland and Todd Haynes is ...
In A Little Love Package, Vienna's institutions, people, buildings, and overlapping epochs make for a stiff drink: a bright, effervescent, lightly intoxicating...
In Tales of the Purple House, French-Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fahdel and his wife, Lebanese artist Nour Ballouk, offer a collaborative video diary of the last few...
One of the more unlikely films to emerge from this year’s Locarno is the Thai debut Arnold Is a Model Student. In aesthetic, it resembles one of those well-hee...
Astrakhan fur is unique: dark, beautiful, and stripped exclusively from newborn lambs, even ones killed in their mother's womb. (Stella McCarthy once said it's...
Irish-born, Berlin-based, Rory O'Connor has been covering the European film festival circuit since 2012. A regular contributor to The Film Stage, his work has also appeared in Frieze, The Playlist, and CineVue.
