Author: Steve Erickson

When R. Lee Ermey, who played the drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), passed away recently, he received many obituaries praising his charismatic performance as a specimen of toxic machismo whose bullying leads to one character bringing the film’s first half to a close by blowing his brains out. Not so fast, suggested writer and veteran Anthony Swofford, whose New York Times op-ed blamed Ermey and the film itself for seducing his generation into signing up for military service. François Truffaut allegedly said, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” His far more politically radical French New Wave...

In Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu’s documentary Infinite Football (2018), he passes the ball to his subject Laurentiu Ginghina. While Porumboiu appears onscreen for most of his film, he generally comes across as a passive observer and shows great generosity to Ginghina. Ginghina, gets to talk far more than he does. In fact, Ginghina is not shy about expressing his ideas, which began with an injury that happened to him as a student playing football (what Americans call soccer) and almost left him unable to walk. He wanted to reinvent the game in order to make it safer. He didn’t succeed. Infinite Football shows...

No moment in the oeuvre of the late Danièle Huillet and her life and filmmaking partner Jean-Marie Straub matches the sense of ecstatic triumph of one scene in their 1968 The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, which opens in a new restoration at New York’s Quad Cinema March 2nd. Shot from a slightly tilted angle, it depicts Johann Sebastian Bach (Gustav Leonhardt) playing a clavier — a precursor to the harpsichord — in front of a torch with one hand while conducting an off-screen orchestra and turning his sheet music’s pages with the other. The scene takes place at night,...