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

2008 has turned out to be something of a watershed for longtime Terence Davies fans like myself; not only has the BFI finally released his visually and aurally astonishing British works on region-2 DVDs with commentaries and interviews, but Davies has also completed his first film in eight years: Of Time and the City.  Fortunately, [...]

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The news that one of America’s greatest film critics, Manny Farber, has passed away is triggering deserved tributes (well-documented by David Hudson at GreenCine Daily), so I feel it’s a good a time as any to remember Christopher Petit’s 1999 essay film/meditation on Farber, itself titled Negative Space (the title of Farber’s reissued and expanded [...]

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Forty-seven years after its premiere, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) has finally returned to its iconic setting of Los Angeles; a newly restored print begins a week-long run at the UCLA film archive tomorrow and is being used to promote at least one historical tour of Bunker Hill. Although the new print premiered in [...]

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The Round-Up (1966)
Just as I was grumbling that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s recent announcement of a Rohmer retrospective in September includes less than a dozen films–all of them readily available on DVD (not even The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque?)–LACMA has unveiled its October line-up, which more than makes up for [...]

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Michael Giacchino and Normand Roger
I sometimes complain about events at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (mostly for its industry-heavy programming, security procedures, and scary metal detectors), but the Academy provides more interesting fare than you might imagine. Last Sunday, they completely outdid themselves: for $5, the public was treated to catered [...]

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A few weeks ago, e-tailers announced a long-awaited two-disc DVD collector’s edition of The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s expressionist masterpiece about the resiliency of children in a nightmarish adult world, but as quickly as cinephiles could get excited, the release was abruptly postponed. The movie is well-deserving of special edition treatment, [...]

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Patient Filmjourney.org readers will be happy to know that my series of life changing events over the past 11 months–including getting married, having a fussy, colicky (but adorable!) child, moving across town, etc–seem to be leveling off and I expect to resume blogging with more regularity shortly.  But if any of my subsequent posts are convoluted [...]

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Given the pervasiveness of prequels, it’s not so unusual that French director Philippe Ramos’ second feature imagines the early life of Moby Dick’s dark, enigmatic Captain Ahab. (Melville provides scant backstory himself, but alludes to Ahab’s orphaned childhood and late marriage.) But Captain Ahab (which won Best Director and a FIPRESCI award at Locarno [...]

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The Los Angeles Film Festival ended yesterday, and I managed to catch a handful of films despite my beleaguered schedule the past few weeks, which I hope is settling down. Look for some posts the next few days summarizing my viewing, including my two favorite LAFF films, Philippe Ramos’ Captain Ahab and Lance Hammer’s [...]

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I’m always proud of the resources Trond Trondsen and I provide at Robert-Bresson.com, and our latest project–years in the making–is an exclusive online Bresson Bibliography that uses Jane Sloan’s 1983 out-of-print bibliography and Shmuel Ben-Gad’s recent bibliographies as a starting point.
As we note on the page: “Users who want to correct or extend the bibliography, [...]

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