A talk with director Sam Cullman on "Art and Craft".

Star Wars - The Force Awakens / Long and slow, in a multiplex led far, far astray.

In The Force Awakens a black man is tasered twice, drinks putrid water from a trough alongside an animal resembling a pig, and - in his own words - states that he used to work in sanitation. OK. Let's let those details slide. Call me politically correct. A Cambridge lefty. I can take it. By the way, that black man is the film's male lead. Does that make everything okay? By now everyone pretty much agrees that there are no major surprises, aesthetically or narratively, in The Force Awakens. OK, maybe the aerial dogfights have a few more twists and turns than last time, and what happens to Han Solo is, well, something of a surprise (though we all saw it coming). But everything from the film's color palette to its chase-scene structure (where's the map? C'mon people!) smacks of deja vu all over again. Of course, it's supposed to. You don't make a billion dollars on a $350 million investment (that's some cabbage right there, folks!) innovating . You ma...

The Apu Trilogy, directed by Satyajit Ray

Criterion's poster for the re-relase of Ray's Apu Trilogy. If you go, see them in the order they were made, preferably in one day. Sure, it's a marathon, but worth every minute. For Boston folks, the Kendall Square Cinema has scheduled them to play back to back, with a 45 minute break between parts 2 and 3, just enough time for a sandwich and a beer at The Friendly Toast! “Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or the moon.” —AKIRA KUROSAWA Criterion's restored 4K theatrical re-release of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy ranks among the top cinematic events of the year. The films are deeply human and tell a timeless, universal story in the simplest of ways. The degree of authenticity here might lead one to believe they're watching a type of ethnographic or anthropological documentary when, in fact, we are talking about a filmmaking style closer to the Italian neo-realists (I'm thinking specifically of DeSica's B...

Locke

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...

Cinema, Literature, Theater, Music, Art.

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