When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

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

infelicitous

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.

Jouissance

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.

Eijanaika

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

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.

It is impossible to extrapolate a single, definite point of view from them: they seem to demand that we look everywhere at once, be everywhere at once.