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Seeing Godard’s Masculine Feminine at Wesleyan effected some change in me, on a cellular level. Contrary to its not being “the total film we carried inside ourselves, that film we would have liked to make, or more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live,” as Jean-Pierre Léaud explains in s…

The next thing that had to go was the endless plot description that pads most film reviews. In the 21st century, film plots are known before the movies arrive in theaters. There are few points a critic has to make that need much plot description, but critic-journalists still put everything on the r…

It makes sense that Black Swan came out around Christmas because Black Swan is like a fruitcake. It is a cake, but not any kind of cake you’d like to eat; it’s heavy; and you find out too late it’s filled with gooey red clumps made out of God knows what. With dialogue like silent movie intertitles,…

Bickerton quotes Jean-Louis Comolli, an editor at the magazine during its most radical phase in the ’60s and ’70s. Film criticism and filmmaking, he wrote, must make “a political choice to stop seeing the audience as an inert, amorphous mass open to all sorts of manipulation by advertising,” and in…