In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s films, compulsive violence and fiendish visitations beset Tokyo. Ghosts stalk empty streets and derelict buildings. Even in Bright Future, which mostly avoids the supernatural, an executed young murderer comes back from the dead to witness the touching relationship between his father and the disturbed former flatmate whose life has unraveled since the sentence was carried out.

The two parts of Che are doomed to be shown separately after the initial “Special Roadshow” opening, but they rightly comprise one movie. This is not to suggest that Soderbergh is experimenting with temporal aesthetics; he lives on Hollywood time, and at four hours plus, Che isn’t visionary, it’s long.

The Earrings of Madame de … was Max Ophuls’s penultimate film, preceding the difficult experience of Lola Montes (1955) and his untimely death at the age of fifty-five in 1957. Into it, as though he somehow sensed that his career was about to end, he collected so many of the themes that had preoccupied him over the previous two decades…

Our first night in Naples, a little past midnight, my wife and I were woken by several gunshots, followed by a woman screaming in English, “He’s still alive! He’s still alive!” We looked out the eighth-floor window of our hotel, as did many of the residents of the apartment high-rise opposite us, and waited for the anticipated sirens and flashing police lights

Mediating Torture, Vampyr, Film Culture in Madrid, New Paths for German Cinema, and the 2008 Films of the Year

READ: Heaven Knows We’re Digital Now, Cinema for a New Grand Game, The Earrings of Madame de…, La malavita: Gomorrah and Naples