Author: Jonathan Eig
David Cronenberg’s Films Ranked from Worst to Best (Part One)
“You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is: You Paid for It.” That was the headline of Robert Fulford’s consideration of David Cronenberg’s first broadly released, publicly financed feature film, Shivers, in 1975. Fast forward twenty years. Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker after seeing Cronenberg’s latest film, Crash, in Cannes: “Beyond the bounds of…
Carl Theodor Dreyer: A Film Primer
I had an epiphany recently. As epiphanies go, it wasn’t a very big one. In fact, it was one I have had too many times to count. Maybe I should call it by a different name. Maybe it was one of those temporary epiphanies. I was on a lovely vacation. It was in a place…
You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: 20 Obscure Movie Lines We Just Can’t Shake
From the moment Al Jolson ad libbed “Wait a minute folks, you ain’t heard nothing yet!” in The Jazz Singer, movies have been filled with great dialogue. There have been speeches like Orson Welles’ “Cuckoo Clock” lecture in The Third Man and Robert Shaw’s USS Indianapolis story in Jaws. Ingrid Thulin’s lament on life and…
The Cruelest Month: Why Most Films Released in January are Terrible
January’s the cruelest month, breeding Redundancy in each frame, mixing A-Listers and High Concepts, stirring Dull plots with big names. No offence to T.S. Eliot, the greatest of all American poets. His correspondence with Groucho Marx alone can make you feel better about the wit and wisdom that mankind is capable of. But when it…
Forget the Oscars: Here are 2014’s Best Films and Performances
Show of hands, how many of you have seen Cavalo Dinheiiro? Maybe you know it is as Horse Money. The Portuguese documentary from director Pedro Costa tied for third in the 2014 Sight & Sound critics poll, making it the highest-ranking documentary on this respected list. Didn’t catch it? How about Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to…