Fellini is the master of blurring the lines between the real and the surreal, demonstrating the overriding imbrication of the familiar and the fantastic. In The White Sheik, currently playing at NYC's Film Forum, he inspires wonder and bemusement.
Although enjoyable in that sweeping big picture kind of way, there is nothing subversive to be found in Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History.
In Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth, political theorist William E. Connolly explores how our assumption that the world is made for us has led us into a dangerous complacency.
The Film Forum in New York City is showing Yasujirô Ozu's Tokyo Twilight for a limited time from Friday, 8 November to Thursday, 14 November. This is a film that one needs to savor and contemplate, a film that captures the tribulations of this world and the evanescent truth that lies beneath them.
Bellocchio's best work, Fists in the Pocket (I pugni in tasca) is key to understanding the stark shift Italian cinema experienced in moving from the post-realism phase of the 1950s into the experimentalism, social commentary, and surrealism of the 1960s.
Unlike his earlier provocations, John Waters' Polyester suggests that moral depravity may be liberating for the person willing to embrace it, but it always gives rise to pain elsewhere.
The key to understanding Burt Lancaster's contribution to film lies in the physicality of his portrayals. Film Forum, New York, showcases many of his films starting today.
It is the impossible demand placed on the woman that drives the engine of Agnès Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't.
Luchino Visconti’s oft-misunderstood Death in Venice tenderly explores how beauty stares back at us and demands that we accept and acknowledge its terrible contradictions.
Franz of Berlin Alexanderplatz doesn't occupy a privileged space of sovereignty over the world. He's not the avatar for divine individuality that we so often take ourselves to be.
Childhood friends are tricky. They're the friends you leave behind but can never completely escape. Elaine May conveys this with disruptive technique in Mikey and Nicky.
