"In this political season, it’s important to remember that politics has always been a dirty business. Robert Altman scores big with two very well-aimed political targets: the unraveling of Richard Nixon in 1984’s Secret Honor and the media circus surrounding a presidential campaign in his 1988 miniseries Tanner ’88. I grew up watching comedian Rich Little doing Richard Nixon impressions that are seared into my brain. Philip Baker Hall is not doing a Richard Nixon impression. He is Richard Nixon. Sans gimmicks. It is a gut-wrenchingly good performance in what is virtually a one-man show. Tanner ’88 stars Michael Murphy as a decent liberal Democrat who—SPOILER ALERT—does not take the Democratic nomination. Sound familiar? Yeah. Depressing. Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool should really just be called Super Fucking Cool but then you’d lose the play on the word “medium” and boy is Wexler playing with medium here—a fictional story, shot cinema verité style, against a backdrop of the very real riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It’s a doozy and especially resonant as we watch the circus leading up to what is sure to be an ugly convention season"

"In this political season, it’s important to remember that politics has always been a dirty business. Robert Altman scores big with two very well-aimed political targets: the unraveling of Richard Nixon in 1984’s Secret Honor and the media circus surrounding a presidential campaign in his 1988 miniseries Tanner ’88. I grew up watching comedian Rich Little doing Richard Nixon impressions that are seared into my brain. Philip Baker Hall is not doing a Richard Nixon impression. He is Richard Nixon. Sans gimmicks. It is a gut-wrenchingly good performance in what is virtually a one-man show. Tanner ’88 stars Michael Murphy as a decent liberal Democrat who—SPOILER ALERT—does not take the Democratic nomination. Sound familiar? Yeah. Depressing. Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool should really just be called Super Fucking Cool but then you’d lose the play on the word “medium” and boy is Wexler playing with medium here—a fictional story, shot cinema verité style, against a backdrop of the very real riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It’s a doozy and especially resonant as we watch the circus leading up to what is sure to be an ugly convention season"

"In this political season, it’s important to remember that politics has always been a dirty business. Robert Altman scores big with two very well-aimed political targets: the unraveling of Richard Nixon in 1984’s Secret Honor and the media circus surrounding a presidential campaign in his 1988 miniseries Tanner ’88. I grew up watching comedian Rich Little doing Richard Nixon impressions that are seared into my brain. Philip Baker Hall is not doing a Richard Nixon impression. He is Richard Nixon. Sans gimmicks. It is a gut-wrenchingly good performance in what is virtually a one-man show. Tanner ’88 stars Michael Murphy as a decent liberal Democrat who—SPOILER ALERT—does not take the Democratic nomination. Sound familiar? Yeah. Depressing. Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film Medium Cool should really just be called Super Fucking Cool but then you’d lose the play on the word “medium” and boy is Wexler playing with medium here—a fictional story, shot cinema verité style, against a backdrop of the very real riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It’s a doozy and especially resonant as we watch the circus leading up to what is sure to be an ugly convention season"

"One has to love a film that has for its subtitle An Introduction to Anthropology. This hardscrabble tale of two blockheads dedicated to making a yen in the flesh trade is the most congruent homage to Laurel and Hardy one could dream of. Everything falls apart around them, but they keep forging on. The film does, too, ratcheting up craziness along the way: a carp in a fish tank—the reincarnation of a deceased husband—somersaults to show its disapproval of the widow’s sexual antics with her new beau; a depressed middle-aged woman jumps on the windowsill of her hospital room and masturbates, to the great joy of a crowd of workers that seems to have just exited the Lumière factory; a crumpled pornographer indulges in a bit of voyeurism that turns into a lesson in the use of angles in cinema, etc., etc.; and finally an ending in the waters off Osaka’s harbor that leaves one howling with laughter. All of it is filmed with an aggressive, unrelenting elegance that puts the viewer through rigorous ocular gymnastics. If you thought that Ozu was the alpha and the omega of the visual possibilities offered by Japanese home architecture, Imamura’s truculent epic will open your eyes anew."

"When I first saw Brazil in the late ’80s, it hit me like a truck. It was such a powerful, bold vision, so joyous in its escapism and so crushing in its ultimate nihilism, that it left my teenage mind in tatters. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d watched but knew it was unlike anything I’d seen before. The impressive (and somewhat sad) fact is that, decades later, I still haven’t seen anything quite like Brazil. It escaped from Terry Gilliam’s brain with such velocity that its power even today is undeniable. I showed it at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles in January of this year, and it still confounded me. I asked Terry Gilliam if he would write a quick intro for me to read out before the screening. This was it: Brazil was made by a bunch of young people who didn’t know any better. They are older and wiser now, but it seems America isn’t. It’s a pity that George W. and Dick Cheney aren’t still running the show. I was tempted to sue them for the illegal and unauthorized remake of Brazil. Just think . . . more people are living my movie than ever went to see it."

"This is going to sound ridiculous because it’s going to sound like I’m doing a bunch of ass-licking but Pulp Fiction. And I shouldn’t hesitate, because it’s good cinema, but… I remember watching Pulp Fiction — whatever age I was, teenage years somewhere — and really struck at the cleverness of it and loving that you can have something as violent, but as humorous and as… I could feel — you know, because I didn’t know him as a person at that point; he was just the director — but I could feel his brain working in the conversations in his head, and his opinions about stuff. The conversations that were like, “I’ve had conversations like that about why you call it a quarter pounder or a royale with cheese.” It was so clever and reachable by me. And I wasn’t a film buff, I wasn’t sort of like a fan about any of that stuff. It just really spoke to me, it was so clever. Then I went back and watched Reservoir Dogs. I think I’d seen it before but I went back and watched it again. But yes, Pulp Fiction was definitely… Actually, it’s cool that I get to say that; I’m happy to be able to say that."

"Here’s another film of which so much has been said and written over the years that you wind up thinking: There’s nothing left to say . . . But of course, that’s always a cop-out because it’s never true—there’s always more to say about a film, to see it again is to see it anew, to see it in 2014 as opposed to 1960 is a very different experience, and for some people it will literally be brand-new (to those people, I would say, simply: See it! Now!!). It’s difficult to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way that people are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear. I realize that L’avventura is supposed to be about characters who are “alienated” from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in general that it more or less shuts down thought. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, it’s one of the great works of cinema."

"I guess I’d start with Blade Runner, which is a film I’ve watched many, many times, and bought many times on different formats, and seen in the cinema many times, and bought books about it and read about the making of it, and watched, you know, all the documentaries that I could get my hands on. I think why I like it is that it’s a film that so transports you to somewhere else. It’s not even just about the story, which is reasonably straightforward, it’s the texture of it — every frame of it, every grain of film, or every pixel on Blu-ray or what not, holds information. It’s so densely packed. You can watch it again and again and see different things in it all the time. That’s the genius of it. I think that period of Ridley Scott, with Alien and all his adverts around that point… I mean, it’s just never dated. If you watch something like Black Hole, which is kind of around the same period, and you look at it, Disney’s Black Hole looks like a films from the ’40s in comparison to Blade Runner. Blade Runner could be made today and it wouldn’t look any different." """