Last year, he won an Oscar for best documentary, though most viewers only remember its gymnastically adept star—death-defying French wirewalker Phillipe Petit—and not James Marsh, the English director who made Man on Wire. Marsh, 46, can live with the anonymity. The success of the film, which chronicled one man’s impossible dream to walk between the towers of the World Trade Center on a highwire, redeemed his career.
Marsh’s next move wasn’t another documentary, though. It’s In the Year of Lord 1980, the middle segment of the Red Riding Trilogy, a grim …

This is the extended remix of an interview that originally appeared at Stop Smiling Online.
Milos Forman answers the phone, and the hectoring cadence of MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is audible in the background of his Connecticut home. He briefly says hello and turns down the volume.
I see you’re hooked on the political channel.
Yes.
What did you make of the elections?
Well, it was entertaining to watch, it was very interesting. It made me feel good about the whole democratic process here. Hearing so many opinions from so many sides. It was …

In the wake of eye-opening exposés like Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Slow Food movement hero Michael Pollan’s thoughtful study The Omnivore’s Dilemma, director Robert Kenner explores America’s industrial food chain in Food, Inc. Kenner tracks the flaws of large-scale chicken and cattle production, among other facets of the industry, and celebrates the virtues of small organic farms and educated consumerism. Much of the personal testimony is harrowing (a mother who lobbies on behalf of her young son who died from E. coli poisoning), and occasionally it’s inspiring (hardcore …

Something of a surprise from the director of the Korean cult classic Oldboy, Park Chan-wook’s Thirst is, like all vampire movies, a really screwed-up love story, and like Park best-loved films, a sometimes hyper-violent meditation on guilt, suffering and vengeance. A saintly priest (The Host’s Song Kang-ho) offers himself as a test subject for a vaccine meant to cure a virus that causes a deadly leprosy. Things go badly, but the dying cleric is miraculously healed by a blood transfusion that profoundly alters his own biology. Much to his …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Director Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In has been the talk of the film-festival circuit for months—the “Swedish vampire movie” that has transfixed audiences with its keenly attenuated evocation of adolescent loneliness and budding first love in the apartment blocks of suburban Stockholm, framed around a latter-day reinvention of the vampire myth. Its two central characters, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and his counterpart Eli (Lina Leandersson), both played by remarkable young actors in their first movie, are a bullied and alienated 12-year-old boy and the mysterious dark-haired girl who only …