David Fellerath

Years ago, Quentin Tarantino gave a notorious interview to TheNew York Times in which he scoffed at films with an earnest message. “Why not just say, ‘I don’t like war,’ and be done with it?” he demanded. In Tarantino’s mind, the horror of war is not a point that needs to get proved over and […]

The chief lesson of Talk to Her, Pedro Almodovar’s meandering and disappointing new film, might be an unintentional one: Beware of films that do your llorando (crying) for you. The film opens, after a very literal curtain-raising, with a modern dance production piece in which two old women in nightclothes hurl themselves around a set […]

David Gordon Green is a man on the move. Right now, it’s Sundance time, which means his current home is in Park City, Utah. “I don’t live anywhere right now,” he confesses in an interview in the atrium of the Park City Marriott. “Lately, I’ve been staying in Texas, where I have a lot of […]

When he was 7 years old, Roman Polanski escaped the Kracow ghetto by crawling through a hole in a brick wall. This image is recreated in The Pianist, his new film about wartime survival in the Warsaw ghetto, but with a horrifyingly different outcome. Polanski surely has been haunted by his narrow escape from evil […]

“Consciousness is a terrible curse,” muses Schwartz the puppeteer to his girlfriend’s chimpanzee in Being John Malkovich. Schwartz, who manipulates his own creations for his conspicuously godlike pleasure, continues by declaring, “I think, I feel, I suffer … and all I ask for in return is an opportunity to do my work.” By now I […]

Filling out a top-ten film list is an irresistible parlor exercise. But it seems the important lists get hijacked every year by a slate of prestigious films whose late release creates collective amnesia among critics for all which came before. Most of the year-end polls are now out. They seem little more than lists of […]

25th HourAfter Sept. 11, we heard a lot about images of the World Trade Center being digitally removed from movies, out of fear that they’d somehow offend audiences, or remind them of a world that they presumably wanted to escape. Martin Scorsese addressed this unfortunate trend at the very end of Gangs of New York, […]

Catch Me If You CanThe late Pauline Kael once wrote of Steven Spielberg, “I can’t tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good moviemakers have got by without being profound.” She continued, “If there’s such a thing about movie sense…Spielberg really has it. But he may […]