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I saw my first movie when I was four or five: it was a revival of 101 Dalmations (1961), and I liked it enough to ask my mother if we could sit through it a second time (we did). I saw my second first movie when I was 19: it was a nine-minute short by Bruce Baillie titled Valentin de las Sierras (1967), and after seeing it I knew film history must be full of secrets. Read more »

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FILM Gaspar Noé wants to share. Yet after three features, it's still unclear whether what he's got on his mind is worth sharing, let alone anywhere near as urgent as his need to share it.Read more »

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>>CLICK HERE FOR OUR INTERVIEW WITH JAMES FRANCORead more »

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FILM At first glance Undertow doesn't really seem a bona fide "great"
movie — time will tell. But it manages so many qualities seldom found together, or pulled off at all, that respect is due. It's sensuous and erotic without becoming puerile fantasy; renders remote, beach-y locations alluring without pandering postcard exoticism or turning the people who live there peasant-quaint. More impressive still, it seamlessly folds magic realism — that very literary quality — into an already well-in-progress narrative Read more »

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FILM Most countries crank out commercial features just as pandering as (if less expensively produced than) the majority of mainstream Hollywood product. Even sacrosanct art house supplier France manufactures plentiful dumb-and-dumber hits that attract little interest (unless it's remake interest) beyond nations where Frog is spoken. Read more »

FILM Take the sex out of a teen sex comedy and hone in on the heard-it-yesterday info overload of the highly social-networked '00s, and you get Easy A, a whip-smart striver looking to give a whole new definition to fast fiction. Read more »

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FILM Alternately slavish and critical, simultaneously buying into and subtly resisting the hype, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector is a bit like the renowned producer himself, who said this to biographer Mick Brown in 2007's Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: the Rise and Fall of Phil Spector: "I have a bipolar personality ... I have devils inside that fight me. And I'm my own worst enemy ... I would say I'm probably relatively insane."Read more »

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FILM Every nation's cinema has its share of memorable contributions to the narrative category of amour fou. But since the French came up with that term in the first place, we might as well grant them a certain supremacy. They definitely tend to arrive at the madness of a self-destructive love with less high melodrama (let alone misogyny) than is the U.S. norm. Read more »