Email Author Melissa Anderson

2013 Stories by Melissa Anderson

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  Chantal Akerman's New York

  published October 23, 2013

  In 1971, at the age of 21, Belgian-born filmmaker Chantal Akerman, after stints in Paris and Jerusalem, moved to New York because, as she... More >>

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  Taking a Second Look at Trouble Every Day, a Claire Denis Flop

  published October 9, 2013

  When Claire Denis's blood-and-lust-filled reverie Trouble Every Day, her most maligned project to date, premiered in New York in 2002,... More >>

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  Concussion Clumsily Hits You Over the Head

  published October 2, 2013

  'After 40, you have to choose between your ass or your face," one offscreen spin-class participant remarks to her fellow affluent fitness... More >>

• 'Cinema of Resistance': Reels of Rage

  published August 21, 2013

  'I make films—that's what I can do for Vietnam," says Jean-Luc Godard in the omnibus anti-war project Far From Vietnam (1967). If... More >>

• Moonage Daydreams With David Bowie, Movie Star

  published July 31, 2013

  Pop music's premier Proteus, David Bowie told Rolling Stone in 1972, "I feel like an actor when I'm onstage, rather than a rock... More >>

• Ginger & Rosa Reveals Young Women—And a World—On the Verge

  published March 13, 2013

  Private dramas unfold against the backdrop of broader historical terrors in Sally Potter's absorbing coming-of-age drama Ginger & Rosa,... More >>

• Steel Yourself for Leviathan, A Watery Knockout

  published February 27, 2013

  End of days or the beginning of new ways of seeing? Fittingly, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan, an... More >>

• Snitch: Dwayne Johnson is Telling

  published February 20, 2013

  Though Snitch loudly announces itself as a social-issues movie, its nominal outrage over the severity of our nation's sentencing laws... More >>

• Safe Haven: Unable to Ignite

  published February 13, 2013

  After Katie (Julianne Hough) has spent a week or so in the coastal hamlet of Southport, North Carolina—she'd settled in a cabin in the... More >>

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  Side Effects May Induce Queasy Pleasure Well Worth Risking

  published February 6, 2013

  If Side Effects, an immensely pleasurable thriller centering around psychotropic drugs, really is Steven Soderbergh's final... More >>

• A Closeted Doc Discovers the World in Yossi

  published January 23, 2013

  For the past two decades, Eytan Fox has been Israel's foremost chronicler of gay life—and the homoeroticized military—in the land... More >>

• The Remarkable Nana Scrapes Childhood of Sentiment

  published January 23, 2013

  Films in which little kids are the protagonists are often laden with heavy-handed sentimentality: Witness six-year-old Hushpuppy, the tiny sage... More >>

• Throw Mama From the Train, Please

  published January 16, 2013

  A chiller about two abandoned little girls and their bond to the wraith of the title, Mama never delivers the primal terror its premise... More >>

• Luv: Another Boyz-to-Men Crime Drama

  published January 16, 2013

  "Imma teach you some real-world shit," ex-felon Vincent (Common) tells his 11-year-old nephew, Woody (Michael Rainey Jr.), as they ride through... More >>

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  Film Forum's NYC Celebration Contains Multitudes

  published January 9, 2013

  "I was asking for something perfect and specific for my city," begins Walt Whitman's 1860 Gotham ode "Mannahatta." Six decades later, that poem... More >>

• Quartet

  published January 9, 2013

  A decorous gathering of dames and other knighted U.K. doyens, Quartet centers on the residents of Beecham House, a baronial residence... More >>

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  10 Movies to Watch in 2013

  published January 2, 2013

  Most of the blathering this year about the death of film and film culture has already evaporated from the mind, like so much inert gas. But one... More >>