Modern Americans

Two-thirds through the Harold Pinter/Joseph Losey film collaboration, & about to lose him with The Go-Between , I’m giving over my smal...

Silent movies are like poems trapped in novels. Certain frames and gestures—shifting hands, a grin, a skein of smoke—stand out with the clar...

I’ll be in San Francisco this Friday, 9/11 to perform my neo-benshi piece for Paul Wegener’s German silent, “Der Golem.” Jen Hofer , Dou...

If you haven’t spent time inside the structured intensities of Brandon Downing’s incomparable film collages, do yourself a favor this Four...

The received wisdom about Satyajit Ray’s eccentric 1967 detective pic, Chiriakhana , is that he never intended to make it. He secured the p...

Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne is wondrous and dull in the way The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine is wondrous and dull. Both came out in...

Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) opens with a closeup of a streetcar’s electric arm sliding along its cable, and the story moves forward wi...

If you were going to produce a documentary on Rabindranath Tagore , Satyajit Ray would seem like the perfect director. He knew the poet as ...

Satyajit Ray’s noirish Kapurush (1965) concerns a screenwriter who discovers his former love married to a boorish planter on a remote Beng...

The protagonist of Satyajit Ray’s Mahapurush (1965) isn’t really a person but a class: the talksy, urban, skeptical, pseudo-intellectual, ...

Thanks to lousy subtitles, I spent most of Charulata — Satyajit Ray’s favorite of his films—thinking that two points in the love triangle a...

One of the most charming things about Joi Baba Felunath is that Satyajit Ray made it at all. Ray invented the master detective Feluda—a so...

Satyajit Ray's scrupulous period piece, a deft study of two chess-crazed zamindars on the eve of British annexation, is as meaningful ...

Bengali superstar Uttam Kumar was known to his fans as Mahanayak—Great Hero—and Satyajit Ray’s 1966 primer on the psychology of stardom wa...

Mini-reviews of four Hollis Frampton films screened at Cinema Project last week (thanks to David Abel for the recommendation): NOCTILUCA...

Faces and noses and color and music imploring relief from plot.

Whites moving between decorated vehicles.

Oodles of mood.

O.K., I liked Chhalia , Amar Akhbhar Anthony 's one for the ages, but this weekend I saw Coolie and my world will never be the same. ...

Kasey's got Jacques Tourneur 's " Canyon Passage " so exactly right that it only remains for me to say that Tourneur's...