Howard Hampton
Road to Nowhere
Howard Hampton on Electra Glide in Blue
June 2013
WHEN BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN wrote “Born to Run” and sang, “The highway’s jammed with broken heroes,” he might have been thinking of a then-current spate of road movies piled with unlikely co-riders and misfit loners. Two Lane Blacktop … READ ON
FILM
Stay Cool
Howard Hampton on Medium Cool
May 2013
JEAN-LUC GODARD AND CINEMATOGRAPHER RAOUL COUTARD were trailblazers when it came to integrating disjunctive locales, attitudes, and story lines, but writer-director-cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s serpentine Medium Cool (1969) went even … READ ON
FILM
In Case of Emergency
Howard Hampton on Hal Hartley’s Trust
January 2013
HAL HARTLEY’S second feature, Trust (1990), has aged gracefully: Its left-handed ambiguities, quizzical juxtapositions, wryly twisted symmetries, blank wit, askance plotting, pungently sketchy characters, and subversive understatement have… READ ON
FILM
Lost Horizons
Howard Hampton on Heaven’s Gate
November 2012
THE UNCUT HEAVEN’S GATE (1980) moves like a valedictory processional into the movie past—a funereal journey that waltzes across an Eastern prologue steeped in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), then heads due West into the then-recent … READ ON
FILM
Road to Nowhere
Howard Hampton on Revolutionary Road
December 2008
AS DILIGENT A PORTRAIT of 1950s marital despair as forty-five million dollars can buy, Revolutionary Road (2008) reconstructs the stultifying suburbia of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel with tender, loving art direction, fastidious location … READ ON
FILM
The Straight Story
FILM
January 2000
SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Richard Farnsworth’s performance in David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) has a beautiful, disarming nakedness: There doesn’t seem to be anything between the elements and his weathered skin except the stubborn … READ ON
IN PRINT January 2000
Howard Hampton: Best of the '90s
Film
December 1999
1. The Last Bolshevik (Chris Marker, 1992) Farewell to the twentieth century: remembering the casualties of history, their dreams of a future that never came to pass. 2. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) The slippery, totemic poetry of America,… READ ON