The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their fifteenth piece, they discuss two documentaries Louis Malle made about the American experience during the 1980s that potentially offer some insight into the issues plaguing this crazy campaign season. LANDON’S TAKE Between the late-1970s and …
What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them …
Few things are more exciting for hardcore cinephiles than the semi-annual Barnes and Noble Criterion sale. For a few precious weeks a year, super high-quality Blu-Rays of obscure and influential classic films are on the relative cheap. Most noteworthy: they look really, REALLY pretty. Most Criterion-heads are lining up to pick up A Hard Day’s …
“Though dealing with adults and serious adult situations, ‘Jules and Jim’ exhibits a formal sense of unbridled glee, with brisk editing, amusing asides, and a sinuously mobile camera. It is alive like few films are.”
Riffing on Terek Puckett’s terrific list of director/actor collaborations, I wanted to look at some of those equally impressive leading ladies who served as muses for their directors. I strived to look for collaborations that may not have been as obviously canonical, but whose effects on cinema were no less compelling. Categorizing a film’s lead …
Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au coeur) Directed by Louis Malle France, 1971 Louis Malle’s first narrative feature-film was 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. A jazzy, contribution to the late-noir period it placed Malle conveniently between the too-cool gangster pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville and the too-cool New Wave pictures of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead of …
It’s past midnight in the dark Le Poste Parisie recording studio. Miles Davis steps up to the microphone, his face illuminated by the flickering cinema screen in front of him. He sees Jeanne Moreau walking slowly along the Champ-Elysses on a stormy night, her face lit only by the lights glowing inside the cafes, bars …