f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

In precise and elegant scribbles, a robust party comes to life filled with folk dancing and social rituals; peasant couples in colorful dress twirl and part, women in rocking chairs sway in time to joyous fiddles, children watch from the top of a stairway. A man takes a drink and sprouts antlers, shadows flicker [...]

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Classical narrative has dominated Hollywood commercial filmmaking for so long that it’s easy to grow a bit jaded toward it, particularly when best-selling screenwriting gurus promote plot structures by page numbers. (”Plot point one must occur within three pages of the 30-minute mark…”) But films that really know how to spin a good [...]

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Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the famous impressionist painter, is commonly referred to as a major filmmaker in history, but his films, strangely enough, rarely figure prominently in retrospectives or the era of Internet film discussions. Part of that may be attributed to the fact that his directorial style is gentle and restrained. [...]

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Bringing Up Baby
Viewers new to American comedies of the ’30s are often surprised by the period’s sophistication and wit, two words not usually reserved for Hollywood comedies nowadays. Screwball comedy, in particular, was a genre that offered an opportunity for Depression troubled audiences to enjoy stories promoting a complete reshuffling of the social order, where [...]

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Repast
One of the last things Susan Sontag did before she passed away last December was program a sequel to her last touring series of classic Japanese films. Of the nine titles in the new series now playing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I’ll remark on the Mikio Naruse selections here. (And [...]

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