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"The best video essay source on the web." (Roger Ebert) This web site is built on a mix of original video essays and critical, personal writing about film, TV, and their connection to broader cultural concerns. Co-founded by Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic for New York Magazine, and Ken Cancelosi, it is overseen by Editor-in-Chief Max Winter.

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CANNES 2012: Hong Sang-soo's IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

Festivals

The screenwriting process produces a kind of sandbox cinema in Hong Sang-soo’s "In Another Country," the Korean director’s latest jazz riff on human interconnection. The film’s beach side location may be consistent with earlier films, but its unique characterizations traverse freely outside the logic of conventional storytelling.

By Glenn Heath Jr.
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May 21, 2012 11:48 PM
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Festivals

Michael Haneke’s "Amour" dares to address the possibility that nightmares and hopeful dreams can co-exist in the same closed-off cinematic space.

By Glenn Heath Jr.
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May 20, 2012 3:48 PM
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1 Comment

Festivals

Indifference kills quietly in Amour, the new psychodrama from Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon, Cache). In this devastating character study about the hell that is caring for an ailing loved one, writer and director Haneke explores grief as a slow, gnawing process. Coping with loss does not, however, begin with a catalyst as mundane as physical illness. Instead, it starts and ends with a debilitating kind of depression that’s facilitated by solitude. For Haneke, grief is just as frightening as death because it’s also a draining progression that we necessarily go through alone.