When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

Building a fire is as important as convincing an army to lift a siege-Ginepro does both, but both actions are given the same patient attention, the same narrative value.

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

But in the movies-and surely this is part of Godard's point-to change forms is to address audiences.

He has gained his art, but he has lost his life.

Eijanaika.

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.

That's one of the marks of a great film artist, I think-the ability to compress, condense, to find resonance in the simplest of images, and to never waste an image, making it work on a number of levels.

there is something in the quality of Ruiz's imagination that summons up those primal Hollywood pleasures, something that connects to our first film-going experiences, when we weren't old enough to follow the plots and still too young to care. Lucas and Spielberg pursue these same memories in their films, but they're too literal minded, too committe

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