David Fellerath

Gangs of New YorkIt’s hard to resist the promise of a film like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. Scorsese has long been a great admirer of cinematic epics of yore, from the silent yarns of Griffith and Stroheim, to the historical and operatic grandeur of Luchino Visconti’s great films Senso, Rocco and His Brothers […]

Now comes a strange interlude in the holiday film release schedule. The Thanksgiving movies have already landed and sucked in their gazillions of dollars. Meanwhile, there’s another week to go before we get hammered by Gangs of New York, The Two Towers and Catch Me if You Can, not to mention the strong lineup of […]

It’s funny how conversations get started sometimes. Sri Lankan-born and Canadian-bred novelist Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, was on the set of the swank Miramax film in 1996 when he met the film’s editor, a fellow Canadian named Walter Murch. The two fell into a conversation whose intellectual and artistic depth and breadth […]

Solaris One can only imagine the reactions of the 20th Century Fox executives when Steven Soderbergh told them he wanted to remake Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. While the 1972 original is a sacred text among hard-core cinephiles, Tarkovsky’s abstruse, contemplative–and action-deficient–films don’t travel well beyond the rarefied realm of urban art houses. In the wake of […]

8 MileEight Mile is the road that defines the perimeter of Detroit. From the city’s center, worn boulevards and avenues radiate like the spokes of a wheel; every mile from the center another road cuts in, running perpendicular, to tell you how far you’ve gone–Six Mile, Seven Mile, Eight Mile. Above Eight Mile you’re outside […]

FridaIt’s surprising that Frida wasn’t made before now. After all, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has been a pop culture icon for nearly 30 years. Before the early ’80s she was primarily known as the exotic wife of famed muralist Diego Rivera. But after Hayden Herrera’s biography of her was published in 1983, Kahlo suddenly emerged […]

Punch-Drunk LoveAlfred Hitchcock told the story of a screenwriter who complained he was never able to remember his best ideas since they came in his sleep. One evening, the writer put a notebook by his bed so he could write down his dreams in the middle of the night. The next morning, after another sensational, […]

The animated films unspool an idiosyncratic vision. It’s also one that’s more than occasionally reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch. In an ongoing battle of uncertain aims, armies made of clay stab at one another. The human body stays in grotesque flux throughout: heads keep changing shape, eyeballs keep falling out. A cranium sliced open reveals the […]

Saturday When I first arrived in New York, the city was reeling from a sensational crime that made headlines worldwide. Thirteen years later, the five young men convicted of raping and nearly killing a white jogger in Central Park are about to be released. They didn’t do it after all. I read it in the […]

There are a number of reasons to see The Ring. For those electrified by an unknown blond actress in last year’s Mulholland Drive, first on the list will be the chance to see the follow-up performance of Naomi Watts. In one of that film’s most famous scenes, Watts’ character astounds everyone, in both film and […]