When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

St. Francis thus becomes the first historical film to take place in the present tense.

He isn't acting anymore-he's living, and he's having one hell of a time.

Cassavetes's commitment to his two principal characters is complete: his camera never once abandons them-never goes behind their backs to offer an editorial judgment-and we must experience the events of the film as they experience them, as integral blocks of time.

In Rowlands's work and his own, you can see Method acting brought to a new level, extended to the point where it becomes something else: it's no longer the externalization of interior feelings, but the complete possession of the body by those feelings; the actor is almost inseparable from his expression.

Jonah

making the chaos of the world work for you; it means dropping a fixed, static identity-which is always your most vulnerable point-and finding the freedom to adopt a series of superficial, provisional ones, all of which become incorporated into an ever-growing you.

what matters for Ruiz is the beautiful blurrings of sense that his story creates.

I read in the papers that we're living in a great period of fantasy films, made possible by the tremendous breakthroughs in special effects technology and the soaring imaginations of a new generation of American filmmakers. But scratch a Star Wars or a Close Encounters and what you find is the same old realism: a linear, cause-and-effect story line

The film opens a Pandora's box of forbidden pleasures, linking a marginally acceptable guilty fantasy-running wild in a department store-to a much darker and more sinister one, that of having a license to kill.

infelicitous