"I see death!" cries Long John Silver in Raúl Ruiz's Night Across the Street. Ruiz, too, beheld surcease, his own from liver cancer, while making Night, which he turned into swan song and summa, fond farewell and career précis. Terminal works such as Mozart's Requiem and Pasolini's Salò can be misinterpreted as prophetic auto-elegies, but Ruiz's chronicle of a death foretold joins such films as John Huston's The Dead and Derek Jarman's Blue as a work of intentional valediction. The…

"Los Angeles Plays Itself is a detoxification program for those of us who carry around too much Hollywood in our heads, who’ve dabbled too greedily in spectacle and crystal tourism. Thom Andersen – a native with attitude - interrogates celluloid Los Angeles with the cold eye of Joe Friday. ‘Only the facts, mam.’ He’s an unabashed patriot who explains “some lies are malignant. They cheapen or trivialized the real city.”

His film presents movie-made Los Angeles as a dialectical triad.…

"The cinema has always held the theater at a curious distance: sometimes invoked with a note of disapproval—one can refer disapprovingly to a movie’s excessive staginess, or disparage it as a work of mere “filmed theater”—but at other times set aside as a privileged space between the real and the imaginary. In Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), the theater serves as a “little world,” a shelter from the chaos and cruelty of the bigger one outside. But if Bergman finds…

"A student and proud product of the renowned Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires - the real incubator of much of what we think of as young Argentine cinema - Matías Piñeiro has written and directed movies all about these surrenders and identity shifts, increasingly under the guise of theater. It's misguided to term the movie you're about to watch as "Matías Piñeiro's Viola" or, say, "Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)" He's the guide of the movie, the writer-director, but he…