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 …

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 …

When previews of American Teen were screened on large overhead monitors in a giant sports bar during a party at this year’s South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, the smartly edited montage of life in a Midwestern high school looked like a teaser for a new cable network series. One of the documentary’s selling points is its professional slickness, achieved on a remarkably slight $5 million budget, which adroitly packages a year’s worth of fly-on-the-laptop peeking into adolescent drama as if such raw, emotional, self-lacerating stuff was a …

December 7, 2007
“Industrial Light and Magic” takes on a whole other level of meaning in David Lynch’s 1977 debut feature. “Eraserhead” was ushered into an unsuspecting world during the same season as “Star Wars” and, in its infinitely perverse manner, was just as much a mythic fable destined to infiltrate pop culture and generate a cult audience of repeat viewers.
Part of the appeal was the film’s disturbing Freudian imagery and deadpan bleak mise-en-scène: It was like watching Todd Browning’s “Freaks” directed by Samuel Beckett, a bad acid …