Originally published February 2008 in the New York Sun.
Don’t look now. While studios have been busy hyping a receding wave of torture-themed horror films — namely the “Saw” and “Hostel” franchises, as well as overbaked remakes of classics such as “Halloween” and “The Hills Have Eyes” — the horror genre is quietly experiencing a resurgence of its low-budget, high-anxiety, 1970s vitality.

One sure sign is the return of zombie auteur George A. Romero, whose seminal 1968 shocker “Night of the Living Dead” was a template for the contemporary horror film as …

PEAKIN’ AT THE BEACON Jagger and Aguilera, the post-millennial Tina Turner/Merry Clayton, in Shine a Light.
Nobody loves the Rolling Stones as obsessively as Martin Scorsese. Think about the way Mick Jagger’s spastic shrieks on “Monkey Man” captured the paranoid craving of the cocaine-addicted mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas. Or the fateful way the guitars of “Gimme Shelter” shimmer like an elegy over the graves of dead Irish cops in The Departed. Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino even used two separate versions of “Satisfaction” to mark the passage of time. …

Originally published in the New York Sun in advance of the Museum of Modern Art’s Jazz Score series. Scroll down for Arthur Penn’s comments on Mickey One, which screens Saturday (Nov. 15) at Anthology Film Archives. There’s also a nice essay at Moving Image Source, by Michael Chaiken and Paul Cronin, for further reading.
Cinema is frequently called the art form of the 20th century, but jazz lays equal claim to the title. The two crossed paths early on, beginning in the late 1920s, as Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway lent …

ARTHUR RUSSELL Living in his own private Iowa, from Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination.
Anyone who mythologizes the glory days of East Village bohemia will watch “Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell” with a frog in their throat. Sympathetic enough to count as a fan’s hagiography, this modestly mounted documentary details the life, death and artistic evolution of Arthur Russell – one of the most remarkable figures to emerge out of the 1970s downtown New York music scene. An Iowa farm boy turned avant-everything cello player, Russell was a child of …

MY FAVORITE OKLAHOMAN Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne indulges his inner E.T.
Sept. 9, 2008
Joining the cult-filmmaking ranks of Frank Zappa and Neil Young, the visionary Oklahoma rockers the Flaming Lips — specifically lead singer Wayne Coyne — have finally unwrapped their long-rumored “Christmas on Mars: A Fantastical Film Freakout Featuring the Flaming Lips.” Seven years in the making, the 85-minute science-fiction head trip makes its New York premiere Friday in a new, and appropriately unconventional, movie space.
Cinema Purgatorio, the Manhattan-based outfit devoted to promoting the indie-est of independent films, has …

HARMONY AND ME The director and Samantha Morton, as Marilyn Monroe, on the Paris set of Mister Lonely.
AUSTIN, Texas
Harmony Korine loves a good yarn. While onstage at the South by Southwest film festival last month, he greeted the audience with a story at least as strange as that evening’s premiere feature, “Mister Lonely.” The film, which opens next week and is Mr. Korine’s first in eight years, details an enchanted yet tragic love affair between a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) and his Marilyn Monroe counterpart (Samantha Morton) at …

Originally published in the New York Sun in advance of the Film Society at Lincoln Center’s Frank mini-retrospective to honor the 50th anniversary of The Americans. Reprised here as a reminder of the full-blown Frank retrospective continuing through Nov. 16 at the Anthology Film Archives.
Fifty years ago today, “The Americans” was published in Paris. Robert Frank’s book of 83 black-and-white images, extracted from more than 28,000 individual shots taken on road trips between 1955 and 1957, did not reflect the apple-pie vistas of Eisenhower suburbia. The Swiss photographer had a …

Most visual artists leave a signature on their endeavors, a revealing “tell” that acts as an immediate way to describe their style. When you think of camerawork in the movies, for instance, there’s no mistaking Vittorio Storaro’s epic eye behind Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” or Gregg Toland’s definitive deep focus in “Citizen Kane.”
So go ahead, try to put a finger on Ed Lachman. For the past three decades, the cinematographer has directed photography for Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Paul Schrader, Mira Nair, Sofia Coppola, and …

Even though his retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek alludes to his “mad obsessions,” Barbet Schroeder seems entirely measured and sensible. The affable and erudite Iranian-born filmmaker acts more like a wily anthropologist, irresistibly drawn into the unruly thicket of human nature, eyes wide open, unsure of exactly what he will find.
“I take reasonable risks,” the 67-year-old Mr. Schroeder said. “I know it looks crazy.”
Film history marks him as a key player in the French New Wave. Mr. Schroeder graduated in his early 20s from a stint at …

So much ado about the revolutionary upheavals of 1968 in New York cinema culture this year, and yet very little looks as prescient as this trilogy of satirical films, cult items all, shot by onetime Vogue photographer William Klein in the decade between LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War and the arrival of the Sex Pistols.
The latest installment in Criterion’s no-fuss Eclipse series of boxed-set obscurities, “The Delirious Fictions of William Klein” more than lives up to its title: these Pop Art escapades erupt with laughing-gas absurdity. Mr. Klein, now …

Given his wild reputation, Alejandro Jodorowsky is — to use the lingo of the 1960s era that fostered him — a pretty mellow cat. This, after all, is the guy who once claimed: “Most directors make films with their eyes. I make films with my cojones.” Now 77, the Chilean émigré has a vibe that is more avuncular than the imperious aura of the macho shaman he portrayed in the classic cult movies El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973).
Visiting this fall for the New York Film Festival’s revival …