All posts by Larry Christopher

foreign films

Stage and Spectacle – Three Films by Jean Renoir

3 Comments

Stage and Spectacle - Three Films by Jean Renoir (The Golden Coach / French Cancan / Elena and Her Men) - Criterion Collection

These three Jean Renoir films were not conceived as a trilogy, but they fit beautifully together in this Criterion package: all luscious with theatrical color, wry in tone, and awestruck by beautiful women. When Renoir returned to Europe after his wartime exile in Hollywood, he first turned to The Golden Coach (1953), an international co-production shot in Rome. It contains all of Renoir’s love of the theatrical life, as a traveling troupe of actors arrives in a colonial town i…
Buy Stage and Spectacle – Three Films by Jean Renoir at Amazon

film history and theory

A New History of Documentary Film

1 Comment

A New History of Documentary Film

This is a thorough and definitive survey/history of documentary films. Concentrating mainly on the output of the US, the UK, and Canada, the authors outline the origins of the form and then show its development over the next several decades. The book is completely up-to-date in discussing films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, and in its coverage of IMAX movies and the development of cable and satellite television outlets. Written in a simpl…
Buy A New History of Documentary Film at Amazon

independent film directors

Before Sunset

3 Comments

Before Sunset

In 1994, director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) made Before Sunrise, a gorgeous poem of a movie about two strangers (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) wandering around Vienna, talking, and falling in love. Ten years later, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have returned with Before Sunset, which reunites the same characters after Hawke has written a book about that night. Delpy appears at the final book reading of his European tour; they have less than two h…
Buy Before Sunset at Amazon

indie films

The House of Yes

2 Comments

The House of Yes

Parker Posey was the It Girl of independent film in early 1997, the year this film (along with three or four others in which she starred) all played at the Sundance Film Festival. This film was the toughest of the bunch to embrace, based as it was on a self-consciously quirky off-Broadway play about Thanksgiving at the home of a particularly strange family. Oldest son Josh Hamilton comes home from college for the holidays, with fiancée Tori Spelling in tow. What he hasn’t told …
Buy The House of Yes at Amazon

independent film directors

Night on Earth – Criterion Collection

3 Comments

Night on Earth - Criterion Collection

Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 ensemble comedy turns a gimmick into a revelation. The story begins in Los Angeles one evening at 7:07 p.m. A talent agent (Gena Rowlands) gets into the back of a taxi driven by a sullen, chain-smoking young woman (Winona Ryder), and over the course of their bumpy conversation, Rowlands’s character becomes convinced that the cabby would be perfect for a particular part in a movie. Meanwhile, at that very moment, taxi drivers in New York, Paris, Rome, and Hels…
Buy Night on Earth – Criterion Collection at Amazon