Amy Taubin
Mother Nature
May 2013
“And here or elsewhere, I don’t have a life. I didn’t know how to make one. All I’ve ever done is leave and come back.” – Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs HEARTBREAKING AND DISTANCED, straightforward and oblique, Maniac Shadows,… READ ON
SLANT
Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color
FILM
April 2013
SOME MOVIES ARE SO SENSORIALLY and emotionally resonant that when one leaves the theater, the on-screen world seems to persist, skewing one’s relationship to sights and sounds, space and time. After I saw Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color,… READ ON
IN PRINT April 2013 [TOC]
For-ev-ah Young
Amy Taubin on Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers
March 2013
LAST NIGHT I saw Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers for the third time. Not because I had to—I’d already taken enough notes to write five pieces—but because I wanted to, the way I want to hear certain albums a hundred times over. The … READ ON
FILM
Brother’s Keeper
Amy Taubin on Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act
March 2013
I REMEMBER THINKING as I watched Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act at the 2012 BAMcinemaFest that it’s an American version of an Éric Rohmer film. The comparison was validated by the final credit, a thank-you to the French master of … READ ON
FILM
Patients’ Patience
Amy Taubin on The Waiting Room
January 2013
ENHANCED CINEMA VERITÉ, Peter Nicks’s The Waiting Room drops us into the middle of the emergency room of Oakland’s Highland Hospital, which has become, by dint of our failed health care system, the primary care facility for a population… READ ON
FILM
Andy Warhol’s San Diego Surf
FILM
January 2013
IN ANDY WARHOL AND PAT HACKETT’S POPISM (1980), there is but half a page devoted to the shooting of a movie that has come to be titled San Diego Surf (1968/1996). Warhol recounts that he, Paul Morrissey, and Viva went to Southern California… READ ON
IN PRINT January 2013 [TOC]
1000 WORDS: KATHRYN BIGELOW
January 2013
THE SETUP of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty puts you in the last place in the world you’d ever want to be. Over a black, empty screen, we hear a sound collage of phone calls made from the Twin Towers after they were hit, ending with… READ ON
IN PRINT January 2013 [TOC]
Dear Diary
Amy Taubin on Jonas Mekas
December 2012
JONAS MEKAS turns ninety this Christmas Eve, and a dozen-odd gallery, museum, and cinematheque shows have been organized worldwide in his honor, including a complete film and video retrospective in Paris at the Beaubourg (through January 7)… READ ON
FILM
Amy Taubin
Film: Best of 2012
December 2012
1 Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg) As Videodrome was to McLuhanesque TV addiction in 1982, Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel is to the new flesh of cybercapitalism. An elegant, minimalist digital death trip, a video game in … READ ON
IN PRINT December 2012 [TOC]
Cat and Mouse
Amy Taubin on Cat Scratch Fever
November 2012
SOMEWHERE IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE—in some confusingly named folder buried in “My Documents” or in the Cloud (if only I had turned on iCloud Backup)—is a review of Lisa Duva’s Cat Scratch Fever (2011). I am intermittently convinced… READ ON