The Conversations #10: Trouble Every Day
The tenth installment of the Conversations is here, just in time for Halloween. In this latest discussion, Jason Bellamy and I turn our attention to Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day, a startling and deeply enigmatic film about vampirism, lust, infidelity and addiction. As usual, ou

The Gingerbread Man
A John Grisham potboiler would seem an unlikely subject for director Robert Altman, who nevertheless made Grisham's The Gingerbread Man his own, mapping the familiar Altmanesque casual pacing and loose aesthetics onto this lurid thriller plot. The film opens with a lengthy aerial shot of a Southern delta on an overcast day, suggesting a storm about to come. Indeed, the en

Judex (1963)
Georges Franju's Judex is an arch, playful tribute to the serials of the influential silent filmmaker Louis Feuillade. Franju shuffles through the plot of Feuillade's lengthy serial of the same name, about an adventurer named Judex (Channing Pollock) whose revenge against the corrupt banker Favraux (Michel Vitold) unleashes a complicated series of schemes. The film is defined by its comple

Some announcements
I've got a couple of updates here, for those who are interested. The first is that, as some of you may have noticed, my brief attempt to start a calendar to keep track of film blog events was quickly aborted. The fact is, I underestimated how much work it would take, I couldn't settle on a good format for updating, and when you get right down to it, I'd much rather be doing actual writi

The Conversations #9: Pixar
The ninth of my conversations with Jason Bellamy has now been posted at The House Next Door. This latest installment of the series is a contribution to the Pixar Week event, which is running from October 4 through October 10. Our conversation focuses on some of Pixar's recent output — especially WA