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Sex and violence are old bedfellows in art cinema. A line can be drawn from the sliced eyeball in Un Chien Andalou (1929) through A Clockwork Orange (1971), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and David Cronenberg's earlier films, right up to Charlotte Gainsbourg's clitoridectomy in Lars von Trier's latest provocation Antichrist. Read more »

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FILM "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table," Alfred Hitchcock observed.

While Hitch was the doyen of everyday suspense — capturing the foreboding whistle of a boiling kettle or the pendulous noose formed by a necktie — his vision of the violent-domestic was hardly singular. Read more »

FILM We go to documentaries to learn about the lives of others, but rarely are we put in touch with the patience, sensitivity, and grit required of listening. Heddy Honigmann's films privilege the social aspect of these encounters and are the emotionally richer for it — I'd bet her hard-earned humanism would appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences if given the chance, but her documentaries remain woefully under-distributed. Oblivion is her first set in Lima since 1992's Metal and Melancholy, still my favorite film of hers. Read more »

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FILM It was the last Bush administration's master PR stroke to render terrorism completely abstract while appearing to frame it in layman's terms. There's no real choosing sides when the choices are "evil" and "freedom" — who's going to say slow down there, pardner, when the cause is painted as humanity against the inhuman? That equation bought carte blanche approval for a lot of dumb subsequent moves, with the world arguably no safer as a consequence.

Most Americans have an absolute faith that we're the good guys. Read more »

>>Check out Jesse Hawthorne Ficks' TIFF takes here.

FILM FESTIVAL REPORT There weren't exactly tumbleweeds rolling through Park City, but this January's Sundance Film Festival did have a becalmed feeling reflecting the economic panic — money, corporate sponsors, and industry personnel weren't falling from the sky quite so thickly as usual, which naturally made the experience that much more pleasant for those simply there to see movies. Read more »

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FILM A bittersweet tone in movies is an easy thing to flub. The most common culprits are asinine sentimentalism and mock-solemnity, neither of which figures into the graceful cinema of Ermanno Olmi. Read more »

DNA science has taught us everyone is unique. Art teaches that everyone — even wildly derivative sons-of-bitches — are kinda sorta likewise (at least technically). Still, there's ordinary "individuality," actual distinctiveness, and then there's whoa. Belonging to this last category is Swedish writer-director Roy Andersson, who's made four features in four decades and surely won't be hurrying up anytime soon.

Does it really take him that long? Read more »

REVIEW Liverpool may belong to the slow club of cinema — long takes, downcast eyes, and monumental landscapes — but the friction between its patient formalism and wild terrain is anything but staid. As with Werner Herzog, Lisandro Alonso sites the existential condition in plainly inhospitable ecologies. But whereas Herzog paradoxically employs grandiloquence to remonstrate the folly of human pomposity, Liverpool's withdrawn narration moves with the stealth purpose of a folk tale. Read more »

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The forests are in flames, the desert is advancing, the glaciers have vanished, and in a solar-powered facility towering above the ice-free waters of the Arctic, some 800 miles north of Norway, a solitary older man (Pete Postlethwaite) roams the hallways of the Global Archive, a warehouse sheltering banks of data-storage servers, a civilization's worth of art and invention, and a Noah's ark of extinguished species. From this lonely outpost, he gravely explores a stomach-churning inquiry: "We could have saved ourselves. But we didn't. It's amazing. Read more »

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The international independent film community may be sprawling in size — separated by continents, countries, and language — but it's united by a love for film, and a desire to share that passion. That's why, during a predawn night in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, a late evening in Slovenia and Europe, and an early afternoon in the United States and Canada, hundreds of people found themselves in shock after learning of the senseless deaths of film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc, killed Sept. Read more »