Especially in his westerns, Ford loved to create bustling, busy interiors full of life and feeling, and he was equally fond of positioning human figures, alone or in small, vulnerable groups, against vast, obliterating landscapes. Shooting from the indoors out is his way of yoking together these two realms of experience — the domestic and the wild, the social and the natural — and also of acknowledging the almost metaphysical gap between them, the threshold that cannot be crossed.

Ernest Hemingway once said that all of American literature could be traced back to one book, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," and something similar might be said of American cinema and "The Searchers."

'The Searchers': How the Western Was Begun

How did a show with almost universal critical support, a star creator and a fan base strong enough to force HBO's hand end up on the chopping block in the first place?

Reached at home on Monday, Mr. Milch sounded tired of talking about the whole thing. But then, typically, he did, arguing that the entire idea of bringing closure to a series was egotistical, paraphrasing a William James idea: "The world does not begin or end with the expiration of any living thing. It just becomes an exercise in bitterness or self-congratulation."

'Deadwood' Gets a New Lease on Life

The book is replete with fascinating, if fearfully context-dependent, travel tips. If you are forced to lie about being a Muslim, claim you're from Indonesia, a Muslim nation few non-Indonesian Muslims know much about. Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined. If you're taking your donkey to high altitudes, slice open its nostrils to allow greater oxygen flow. Don't carry detailed maps, since they tend to suggest 007 affinities. If, finally, you're determined to do something as recklessly stupid as walk across a war zone, your surest bet to quash all the inevitable criticism is to write a flat-out masterpiece. Stewart did. Stewart has. "The Places in Between" is, in very nearly every sense, too good to be true.

'The Places in Between,' by Rory Stewart

Stanley Kauffmann could see what was wonderful about Antonioni's "L'Avventura." So could I, at the time; but later, after suffering through "Blowup" and "Zabriskie Point," I started to forget what had once thrilled me. Here is the reminder: "Obviously it is not real time or we would all have to bring along sandwiches and blankets; but a difference of 10 seconds in a scene is a tremendous step toward veristic reproduction rather than theatrical abstraction." (And, he forgot to add, it gives you 10 more seconds to look at a veristic close-up of Monica Vitti, who did to us in those days what Monica Bellucci is doing to a new generation of horny male intellectuals right now.)

'American Movie Critics' - The New York Times Book Review

I was a college student when I saw "L'Avventura" for the first of many times, and it changed my life.

Antonioni's Nothingness and Beauty

It's not my preferred way to go, but were I to die chasing a shirtless thug in a French action movie, I'd want to do it with all my might, like the anonymous goons in ``District B13." When a body plummets down a stairwell or is hurled against a slot machine, it does so with conviction. Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

District B-13 (Banlieue 13) Movie Review | The Boston Globe

At the whirling-dervish center of the French action film "District B13" is a fighting discipline known as parkour. I'm pretty sure that's French for "somersaulting over balconies while drop-kicking the gangsters who kidnapped your sister and turned her into a junkie." However it translates, parkour isn't par-for-the-course movie mayhem, but a gorgeously choreographed gymnastics of pain that elevates "District B13" over the impossible missions and last stands of the season.

If you happened to visit IMDB, you might notice that the aforementioned sister-turned-junkie (Dany Verissimo) has also appeared in such notable French cinema as:

* Une nuit au bordel, alongside such accomplished stars as Monika Sweetheart;
* Ally et xperiment, with Tiffany Hopkins;
* French Beauty, with Sebastian Barrio;
* So Long Mister Monore, with Titof; and
* an episode of Les Tropiques de l'amour, with Rita Faltoyano and Monica Sweet.

Wikipedia offers some background.

District B13 - Review - Movies - New York Times

The great French director Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge) is said to have bristled at the suggestion that his 1969 adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel about a band of French Resistance fighters during World War II presented its characters in much the same light as the wily con men and hoods who populated Melville’s better-known gangster films. Helping to cement the connection, no doubt, was the presence of stars Lino Ventura (as the brave civil engineer Philippe Gerbier) and Paul Meurisse (as organization head Luc Jardie), who just three years earlier had played the escaped con and the commissaire hot on his trail in the diabolical cat-and-mouse game of Melville’s Le Deuxième Soufflé. Yet I can think of no higher praise for Army of Shadows than to say that it approaches its pulse-quickening tale of life in the underground in the same exacting way Melville rendered so many stories of life in the underworld. As with the ascetic criminals he couldn’t resist mythologizing, Melville — who, like Kessel, had been a member of the Resistance himself — sees the brave rebels as steely men of action (and women, hence the unforgettable Simone Signoret as the resourceful Mathilde), operating outside the law and according to their own strict codes, never allowing emotion to cloud their judgment. The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville’s trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal. At its center rests the granite-featured Ventura, his final meeting with a once-trusted compatriot on a Paris street a chilling reminder that, in wartime, even mercy is brutal. Presented in a new 35 mm print, the film is being released in the U.S. for the first time thanks to the invaluable Rialto Pictures.

Army of Shadows | LA Weekly

Haneke pushes past simply representing violence to explore our mediated relationship to it through the televised images of real-life horror that permeate our everyday lives

Michael Haneke | LA Weekly

In Terrorist, a novel whose title will either roll eyes or raise eyebrows, John Updike seeks to crack open one of the hardest shells available to the New England writer: the mind of the young, angry, resentful Muslim.

This quote cropped up in Gabriel García Márquez ["Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses." ]

The Spider and the Wasp: John Updike and his Terrorist | LA Weekly