A FILM AUDIENCE watching an old print of D. W. Griffith's film "The Birth of a Nation" can be expected to feel the following: horror, distaste, fear, creepy emotional involvement, fascination, revulsion ... and then maybe the same pattern several times over again as...

The crystalline face of soap films The surface of a glistening soap film tightly stretched across a closed wire loop, of the type kids use to blow soap bubbles, is the smallest possible area that can span the loop. That minimal surface...

TIMERunning Time 97 minutesWritten and directed by Kim Ki-dukStarring Park Ji-yun, Ha Jung-woo Kim Ki-duk’s Time, from his own screenplay (in Korean with English subtitles), unfolds as an incongruously brightly lit tale of disenchantment and despair over the impermanence of all things, most of...

War On Terror: We get the sense the Saudis grin and kiss us on both cheeks when we walk into their palaces, then spit on the ground the moment we leave. The latest affront is over Iraq.It turns out our "close ally" King Abdullah, in...

[Faces] is, I think, a great and courageous film in which Cassavetes has dared more than any American director in recent memory, and it is important to understand the nature of what he has done. (p. 217) [Several] qualities have led to a few dissenting dismissals of Faces as "a home movie." But this charge confuses style with substance and misses entirely the compassionate intelligence which Cassavetes—who also wrote the script—brings to his subject. He has a shrewd and highly mo...

In Faces, John Cassavetes stigmatizes the American middle-aged upper-middle-class couple: in the midst of the Youth Era, someone has touched the untouchable, the unfashionable, the unsellable. Until now the fatigued adults of Faces had served as background character parts, as caricatures to be made fun of. They were, to pronounce the horrible word, parents. But Cassavetes has brought these neglected elements of society into the limelight…. (p. 31) What matters in Faces is gestures, looks, attitudes, ...

Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and even Taxi Driver used a good deal of loose, inconsequential action (or inaction) to work up a feeling of the New York streets…. When the action of these films finally blows, unravels, they're all the more effective for having seemed so plotless. The lonely prophet of this kind of script and visual style—so carefully designed to look like cinéma vérité—was John Cassavetes. Particularly in films like Faces and A Woman U...