Category: Film
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The Reel Argument: Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi made films about women being destroyed by the world, and he made them with a camera that moves like a conscience — slowly, continuously, unable to look away. He is the greatest filmmaker Japan has produced on the subject of female suffering, which is to say he is the greatest filmmaker Japan has…
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Saul Bass & The Seventy Seconds That Changed Everything
Saul Bass did not invent the film title sequence. He did something more consequential: he convinced Hollywood that the audience’s first minute and a half was not dead time to be tolerated but a work of art to be made. Everything that followed — in cinema, in corporate identity, in the visual culture of the…
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The Reel Argument: Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujirō Ozu made films about the same thing for forty years — the Japanese family, its dissolution, the grief of parents watching children leave, the quiet devastation of time — and he made them with a formal consistency so extreme that critics spent decades arguing about whether it was a limitation or an achievement, before…
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Late Fame Review
Late Fame (2026): The Poet and His Public Director: Kent Jones Screenplay: Samy Burch, based on Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Cast: Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, Edmund Donovan Running time: 97 minutes Country: United States Rating: ★★★★½ — 4.5/5 Willem Dafoe makes the experience of being flattered look wonderfully complicated. As Ed Saxberger, a New York postal…
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The Reel Argument: Chris Marker
By Bergotte Chris Marker made films about memory the way a philosopher makes arguments — with total rigour and total freedom simultaneously, following thought wherever it led without the obligation to arrive anywhere comfortable. He is the most intellectually radical filmmaker in the history of the medium and also, paradoxically, one of the most personal,…
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Eva Marie Saint, 1924–2026: The Intelligence of Grace
Eva Marie Saint belonged to that rare category of actor whose place in cinema history could have been secured by two performances alone. As Edie Doyle in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront in 1954, she brought moral clarity and emotional delicacy to one of the defining films of post-war American cinema. Five years later, as…
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The Reel Argument: Satyajit Ray
By Bergotte Satyajit Ray made his first film in 1955 with borrowed equipment, a cast of non-professional actors, and enough money for perhaps half the shooting he needed, and what he produced was one of the most complete and devastating works of art that cinema has ever seen. Pather Panchali — Song of the Little…
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The Reel Argument: Agnès Varda
By Bergotte Agnès Varda spent sixty years making films about the people and things that the world had decided did not matter, and she did it with a curiosity so genuine and a formal intelligence so complete that the combination amounts to something close to a philosophy of cinema — a sustained argument, made in…
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The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
By Bergotte Rainer Werner Fassbinder made forty-four films in sixteen years, and then he died at thirty-seven of a drug overdose in a Munich flat in 1982, and the output is so staggering and the life so short that the mathematics alone feel like an argument — an argument that something was burning in this…
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The Reel Argument: Maurice Pialat
By Bergotte Maurice Pialat is the best French filmmaker of the second half of the twentieth century that most people outside France have never seen, and the neglect is one of those quiet scandals that film culture periodically allows to accumulate without anyone taking responsibility for correcting it. He made films about love the way…
