Made by renowned artist Ai Weiwei and his filmmaking team, Ping’an Yueqing begins with Qian Shunnan in his sparse home, crying out simultaneously praises of the Chinese Communist Party and calls for an investigation of and revenge for his son Qian Yunhui’s death. In 25 December 2010, in the eastern city of Yueqing of Zhejiang Province, village …
As the title of the series implies, the ‘real’ in these handful of recent independent Chinese documentary films is not clear cut or concise; it is complex and contested. In fact, these films identify an overarching …
Wings of Desire starts with a man jotting down the story of a universal child who didn’t know it was a child. Titles come up as if they were scratched up on a blackboard. An eye looks up into the sky and the camera fades into a slowly moving aerial shot from above the tenements of Berlin. An angel with fading wings…
It’s very rare that a movie itself will feel alive with some sense of self-awareness. Much of the time we read a film as a reflection of the actors, the screenwriters, the surrounding socio-political climate, or most often that of the director. Yet despite the indelible touch of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami on his 1990 masterpiece…
Back in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s, father and son musicologists John and Alan Lomax traveled the American South in search of previously unrecorded and undocumented music styles and songs for the Library of Congress. Their trips resulted in many new discoveries like Muddy Waters and many rediscoveries (locating of previously recorded artists …
Stitched loosely together from the pages of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game and a few borrowed conventions from film noir, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a stylish and enigmatic thriller that acts as a superb demonstration of how atmospheric elements can be more vital than story. Character…
Tokyo-Ga (1985), Wim Wenders’ documentary of his trip to Japan in search of the world as seen in the films of famed director Yasujirô Ozu, was described by Vincent Canby on its American premiere as a “small but important film.” Thirty years on, with greater access to Ozu’s films and the expansion of Wenders’ own…
Sometimes, it’s hard to tell whether some movies are impossibly complicated or endearingly simple. Such is life in Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders’s 1984 ode to the American southwest. Fragmented into half-hour segments which each stand with their own tone and main cast, this classic from the German filmmaker crafts a visual journey so lush with …
Announcing its cinematic intentions in the first frames, the third and final installment of Wim Wenders’ “Road Movie Trilogy” (a series of films that started with Alice in the Cities in 1974 and continued with The Wrong Move in 1975) Kings of the Road (1976) is the work of a master filmmaker who chooses not only to work in black and…
Wim Wenders’ 1972 German-language film The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was based upon the Peter Handke novel of the same name. It is a steady film that follows a seemingly uninteresting, lonely man who commits a crime and reacts with equal disinterest, thinking only of himself at all times, eventually appearing to…