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from Film Quarterly Fall 2010, Vol. 64, No. 1 Edward Lawrenson According to the speculation that always accompanies the run-up to the announcement of the Cannes Film Festival program, the 2010 edition (May 12-23) was almost certain to premiere new films by Terrence Malick and Béla Tarr. In the event, neither Malick’s The Tree of [...]

The uncomfortable thing about the Tribeca Film Festival (April 21-May 2, 2010) is that nobody knows exactly what it is for. This may be a problem that it will never solve. It is not prestigious enough to woo any really good stuff away from Cannes, and in any case Venice and Berlin are always vigilant about picking up that festival’s scraps.

Some thirty years ago, in “Dream of the Wise Child”, Ann Douglas noted that a considerable swath of commercial literature from the 1970s was given over to the repeated but often ignored proposition that children are not innocents so much as malign creatures, intransigently evil.

At one point in Wild Grass, the protagonist Georges is typing at his desk late at night. As Mark Snow’s wistful music plays, the camera commences a slow tour of the room, encompassing a picture, a lamp, bookshelves, and an African mask on the shadowy wall. When it reaches the heavily draped window, though, we realize that time has been compressed; suddenly it is morning outside