Slacker

This movie is enjoying its official 20-year anniversary, so I thought I’d reprint an article I wrote about it, “Stranger Than Texas,” which appeared in Film Comment’s July-August 1990 issue. Yes—1990: 21years ago. Here’s how that happened: I saw Slacker at a 10 a.m. screening at the Seattle International Film Festival in May ’90, drawn by a catalog [...]

The Young Girls of Rochefort (The Cornfield #28)

A piece from this film’s re-release in 1998, published by the old Film.com. “Joy” is a word so alien to the experience of moviegoing these days that it may not actually occur to audiences to expect it. Nobody feels joy over supposedly escapist fare such as Enemy of the State or Meet Joe Black; you [...]

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (The Cornfield #18)

The Brothers Grimm never named the dwarfs, a point Walt Disney was not about to miss. People like things to be ordered, to be numbered if possible, but at least given a trait and a name to be arranged by. So: Doc, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Dopey, and Grumpy. You spend half your time during [...]

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

This piece on Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped was published in the July-August 2005 issue of Film Comment. It’s revived here upon the arrival of Audiard’s A Prophet, which is a triumph. – Robert Horton A sublimely vulgar yellow sportcoat connects The Beat That My Heart Skipped to Fingers, James Toback’s 1977 [...]

Code Inconnu

Here is a piece on Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu from the Nov.-Dec. 2000 issue of Film Comment. I republish it because Haneke’s new film The White Ribbon is bringing him even more international (especially U.S.) attention; obviously, this piece was written before he created the major works Cache and The Piano Teacher. Writing ten years later, the [...]

High and Low

Here’s another oldie: a program note about a Kurosawa classic, written in 1981 for a University of Washington film series – thus readers are assumed to have just watched the movie. High and Low turns up on my Ten Best of 1963 list, too. – Robert Horton Cinema is a window, a window through which [...]

Pauline at the Beach

Eric Rohmer died today, so I am publishing  a piece I wrote on Pauline at the Beach in 1984. It was written as a program note for a film series and presumes the reader will have just watched the movie, so it has both spoilers and a paucity of exposition. Mostly I’m posting it because of [...]

The Magnificent Ambersons

This piece dates to a program note written for a Welles series in 1986. I was a co-founder, with Tom Keogh, of a nonprofit called Seattle Filmhouse, and we brought a few notable critics (Jonathan Rosenbaum and David Thomson among them), as well as Welles’ hard-working latterday cinematographer, Gary Graver, to Seattle to talk about the [...]

Sunset Boulevard

It begins in the gutter…but of course. A street name, Sunset Blvd., painted on the curb above the sewer drain is a convenient way to present the film’s title, but it also tells us where we’re going: down. Even the abbreviation gives it a kind of slangy, tabloid grit. The title refers to one of [...]

The Manchurian Candidate

A piece I wrote on The Manchurian Candidate for a web encyclopedia, and thus meant to be an introduction to a classic. It’s one of the ten best movies of 1962, a list seen here. –Robert Horton I love Yen Lo. Perhaps you don’t recognize the name? Well, the brain can easily play tricks on [...]