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Night&Day;

Boyz (and Girlz) ‘n the ‘Hood

By Michael Fox

Published: May 28, 2008

School’s out and it’s Kids Korner at the movies for the next three months, as Hollywood floods the market with a summer harvest of CGI heroes and villains, and slapstick doofuses and...

Night&Day;

If ... Only

By Michael Fox

Published: May 21, 2008

Brit bad boy Malcolm McDowell didn't have his poster thumb-tacked to as many bedroom walls as James Dean or Marlon Brando did, but only because he hailed from a smaller country. As an exemplar of...

Night&Day;

Flight of the Monkeys

By Michael Fox

Published: May 14, 2008

In their dubious quest to appease every last parent from the Bible Belt to Berkeley, the namby-pambies at Pixar, Disney, and other studios have forgotten that fairy tales are supposed to be scary....

Night&Day;

Loving Nico

By Michael Fox

Published: May 14, 2008

In a perfect world, the revival of Philippe Garrel's 1991 pinnacle J'entends plus la guitare ( I Don't Hear the Guitar Anymore ) would warrant more than a two-night stand. (It did play for a week...

Night&Day;

Street Fighting Woman

By Michael Fox

Published: May 7, 2008

After four decades of historical reductivism and revisionism, the incendiary student protests of 1968, here and in Europe, have been neatly placed in a box labeled "the antiwar movement." Vietnam...

Feature

Best of the Fest

Our critics' recommendations from this year's films.

By Michael Fox

Published: April 23, 2008

Alexandra (Alexander Sokurov, Russia) Spare yet tactile, a mysterious mixture of lightness and gravity, Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra is founded on contradiction. Musing on war in...

Feature

Q&A; with Medicine for Melancholy Director Barry Jenkins

Local film director gives this town a dose of its own Medicine.

By Michael Fox

Published: April 23, 2008

Barry Jenkins' terrific debut feature, Medicine for Melancholy , is an intimate and sociologically astute study of a young African-American couple spending a day together kicking around San...

Night&Day;

Here's to You, Mr. Robinson

By Michael Fox

Published: April 23, 2008

Michael Robinson is a poet, a prankster, a moving target. Heralded as one of the rising stars of avant-garde cinema, Robinson is that rare artist whose sometimes pensive, sometimes invasive films...

FilmCap

Hollywood Chinese

By Michael Fox

Published: April 9, 2008

The demeaning portrayal of minorities in the first century of American movies (and 60 years of television) has been chronicled with righteous indignation and academic rigor in countless...

Night&Day;

Bullet Train

By Michael Fox

Published: April 9, 2008

The high-concept ad campaign for the 1960s deodorant Hai Karate spoofed Western spy movies and Eastern martial arts to ludicrous but memorable effect. Some mighty clever young guns worked on...

Night&Day;

Avant-Garde Aphorisms

By Michael Fox

Published: April 9, 2008

Long before the ubiquitous DVD and its pusherman Netflix upended the traditional moviegoing and movie-showing model, a few visionary local experimental filmmakers had tired of the passive...

Night&Day;

Do the Right Thing

By Michael Fox

Published: April 9, 2008

Privileged Western directors are regularly tempted to shine a spotlight on an evil social problem in the developing world, but they're trapped in a bind. To attract an audience, they feel compelled...

Night&Day;

Sandcastles

By Michael Fox

Published: April 2, 2008

In the shifting sands of the Middle East, the only constants are faith and fables. They coexisted quite happily before the rise of fundamentalism, and they find a soulful commonality in Nacer...

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Artists' Union

By Michael Fox

Published: April 2, 2008

On a February day in 1919, four pissed-off heavyweights of the silent era signed a pact. Although the movie industry was still young, businessmen had already figured out how to assert themselves...

Night&Day;

Nuns Without Rulers

By Michael Fox

Published: March 12, 2008

Even before China's ruthless smackdown of demonstrators last week, good news out of Tibet has long been hard to come by. Well, here's a ray of sunshine: On a remote, picturesque plateau north of...

Night&Day;

Experiments in Solitude

By Michael Fox

Published: March 12, 2008

In addition to their many other virtues, Jennifer Reeves' avant-garde films are a poetic response to a violent, deranged world. Lest that sound soft and squishy, rest assured that the...

Night&Day;

Miles Ahead

By Michael Fox

Published: March 5, 2008

The Biblical proverb that a prophet is without honor in his own home goes a ways toward explaining why the young saxophonist Albert Ayler split for Sweden in the early 1960s. Stockholm was a whole...

Night&Day;

Do the Jane Fonda

By Michael Fox

Published: February 20, 2008

Jane Fonda is a mellow, retiring tabby, but not so long ago she was a sex kitten and antiwar tiger of the first rank. Henry's daughter (and Bridget's aunt) was never more seductively feline than as...

Night&Day;

Woman On Top

By Michael Fox

Published: February 20, 2008

Talk about a Rorschach test. Just minutes into Jennifer Fox's first-person, six-hour documentary Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman , you'll either want to hug her, strangle her, fuck her, or...

Night&Day;

Nights of Cabiria

By Michael Fox

Published: February 20, 2008

When Giovanni Pastrone's three-hour, effects-laden masterpiece Cabiria burst onto Italian movie screens in 1913, some clever fellow coined the phrase "cinematographic opera." Nowadays we'd say...