Bradlands
1 - 10 of 69
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Brian De Palma’s Domino is a puzzle
Hastily made and by conventional standards plainly incomplete, De Palma’s latest straight-to-home release thriller ‘accidentally’ makes for a riddle as rich as the director’s more micro-managed film games, writes Brad Stevens.
Tuesday 5 November 2019 -
Stephen Frears: master or auteur?
The British director of films as diverse as The Queen and Grifters is always in perfect control of his material and has a carefully detectable style. But does that make him one of the greats, asks Brad Stevens.
Wednesday 2 October 2019 -
A wider view: CinemaScope today
In the age of widescreen 1.85:1 televisions, letterboxed ’Scope can look as strange as the severity of Academy Ratio, and what was once an illusion of reality has become a vision of artificiality, writes Brad Stevens.
Monday 19 August 2019 -
The masks of Agnès: Varda’s self-portraits and performances on screen
Varda by Agnès, the director’s final film, offers another glimpse of her performative auteur persona – and continues her own tradition of conflating the roles of in front of and behind her camera, writes Brad Stevens.
Wednesday 17 July 2019 -
“So nobody can lie”: Sam Fuller’s Falkenau and the morality of tracking shots
Two comparable sequences from very different Holocaust films takes us back to a time when we still lent images moral meaning, writes Brad Stevens.
Tuesday 11 June 2019 -
Nell Shipman: an auteur in the wild
In the frame shots bracketing her 1920 western-with-an-automobile Something New, the silent-film pioneer wrote her own claims to cinematic authorship directly into the movie – decades before men coined the auteur theory, writes Brad Stevens.
Wednesday 1 May 2019 -
Disrupting the director: when an auteur meets the Method
What do you do with an actor who refuses to take direction? Marlon Brando was too wild for Stanley Kubrick, whereas Arthur Penn built The Missouri Breaks around his performative anarchism. But perhaps Kubrick had already learned the lesson working around Peter Sellers on Lolita, writes Brad Stevens.
Monday 25 March 2019 -
The Wizard of Lies: three faces of Robert De Niro
Barry Levinson’s Bernie Madoff biopic brings together key facets of the actor’s star persona, as he plays an opportunistic individual who is nevertheless rigorously self-controlled, writes Brad Stevens.
Thursday 28 February 2019 -
As tears go by: why do film characters cry at the cinema?
From Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie to Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys, when movie characters watch films, it’s often an intensely sorrowful experience. Could this be the way cinema expresses its self-conscious sadness about its own transience, asks Brad Stevens.
Monday 21 January 2019 -
The Other Side of the Wind: understanding Orson Welles’s ‘impossible’ film
After languishing unfinished for decades, does the now-completed movie carry a message from the auteur who first imagined it, or does it instead remain a tantalising cinephile puzzle, asks Brad Stevens.
Friday 21 December 2018
1 - 10 of 69
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