Infamous had Capote, Antz had A Bug’s Life—the list goes on. Enter The Fire Within, Werner Herzog’s latest brush with nature’s extremities, and the second docu...
In the middle of the 1970s, Sergei Parajanov was killing time. Imprisoned for what the authorities considered subversive activities (he was, amongst other thin...
Walk a few clicks from Venice's Palazzo del Cinema and you'll find the Hotel Excelsior, as grand a work of Moorish revival architecture as you can likely find ...
What room is left for an honest gunslinger in a world where their tropes are repackaged ad infinitum? Have meticulous imitators like Red Dead Redemption actual...
Love Life is one of those films that really wears its screenplay. The plot follows a mother's attempts to come to terms with the death of a child, but it's mor...
In the mid-1990s Darren Aronofsky wrote a list of ten movies he hoped to one day pursue. His first six, from Pi to Noah, all came from it. (No one seems to kno...
Is reinvention overrated? For at least 45 minutes, Athena (named for the fictional area where the film is based as well as the goddess of wisdom and war) threa...
There is a paradox at the heart of Master Gardener. In their respective worlds—one of abstinence and iconography; the other of money and risk—priests and gambl...
This year’s Venice Film Festival competition has not been short on bloat. Todd Field, Noah Baumbach, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu all turned in sprawling works th...
At the end of the 1970s, while working as a bat boy for the Portland Mavericks, Todd Field had a bright idea: why not make a stringy-shaped gum (call it Big Le...
Irish-born, Berlin-based, Rory O'Connor has been covering the European film festival circuit since 2012. A regular contributor to The Film Stage, his work has also appeared in Frieze, The Playlist, and CineVue.