film directors – The News Desk

19Nov

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Entertainment

John Woo Returns to Hollywood

On December 1st, the Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo will release his first American movie in twenty years, a dialogue-free Christmas revenge drama called “Silent Night.” But his imprint on mainstream American cinema never went away. Woo’s approach to action filmmaking is detectable everywhere from Marvel movies to the “John Wick” franchise. At their best, Woo’s successors carry forward his style of visually spectacular action set pieces and bloody, balletic fight choreography. At their worst, they fetishize Woo-like action without Woo’s half cynical, half romantic style of melodrama.Woo (originally Wu Yu-seng) was born in 1946 in the mountainous Chinese region of Guangzhou. He grew up in the slums of New Kowloon, formerly Shek Kip Mei, after his father, a high-school teacher, moved their fa...

Remembering Terence Davies, the Greatest British Director

10Oct

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Entertainment

Remembering Terence Davies, the Greatest British Director

There’s a special pain to the news of the death of the British filmmaker Terence Davies on Saturday at the age of seventy-seven: his career, filled with some of the greatest movies of the past forty years, has always seemed just to be getting started, and, to the end, he kept the exuberant bearing of youth. He was past forty when he made his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988)—one of the most original of all début features—and he only made eight more, not because he worked slowly but because the money was slow in coming. Although Davies was among the most accomplished of filmmakers, he remained a perpetual beginner, always on the verge of breaking out but never quite getting there. He reached old age with too few films made—a grievous loss to the history of cinema—but with...

23Sep

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Entertainment

“Early Short Films of the French New Wave” Is a Revelation

“Love Exists”Poverty and a coldly indifferent social order are also the prime subjects of the writer and director Maurice Pialat’s documentary essay-film “Love Exists,” from 1961, the most accomplished and far-reaching work in the set. Starting from the workaday banality of bustling city streets, of crowds, trains, platforms, buses, and the cold frustration of traffic-clotted roads, Pialat unleashes an autobiographical story (spoken in voice-over by Jean-Loup Reynold) that amounts to a long-stifled cry of rage. He describes growing up in working-class Paris, which, though poor, had a level of vitality in its public life (open-air dances, movie theatres) and also proximity to nature. What he now finds there is not just economic deprivation but desperate neglect, a cultural void in which bo...

What to Stream: Lust, Caution, and Ira Sachs’s “The Delta”

5Aug

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Entertainment

What to Stream: Lust, Caution, and Ira Sachs’s “The Delta”

One of the worst things about Hollywood is the way that it concentrates location shooting in a single town. And one of the best things about American independent movies, especially in the modern age of first-person filmmaking, is their regionalism. When young directors return to their home towns and shoot their coming-of-age stories, they collectively provide a more varied and complex vision of America. Think of the Austin of early Richard Linklater, the Brooklyn of Spike Lee. Or another instance: Ira Sachs, whose latest film, “Passages,” opens today, set his first feature, “The Delta” (1996), in and around Memphis, where he grew up. The movie (newly streaming on the Criterion Channel) is the story of Lincoln (Shayne Gray), a high-school student from a prosperous family who’s growing up g...