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Two centuries after his death, Eriugena was judged a heretic because of his equations of God with creation and humanity with divinity. To Eriugena, God is not an omnipotent Father, but an unknowable, uncategorizable, and transcendent “non-being” that mysteriously arrives at a process of “self-creation”—in a word, illumination. Every being and thing is a “theophany,” a divine manifestation, “all things low lamps shedding diffuse divinity” as Hugh Kenner put it....

Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (Shinji Somai, 1981) Critics often lament the fact that Shinji Somai (1948–2001) became a director in the 1980s, when Japan’s surging bubble economy displaced the golden-age studio system. As a result, he was ignored by Western cinephiles who spurned the highly commercial films he made (often to promote teen idols) at the behest of ambitious businessmen like publisher and producer Haruki Kadokawa. What is omitted from this narrative of a crassly consumerist “lost decade” in Japanese film is that Somai knew how to both work within the constraints of the industry and push back against its ethos of disposability....

“I’m kind of a mumbler,” says Sofia Coppola in a noisy Soho restaurant, looking a tad concerned at her interviewer’s digital recorder. It was an apt beginning for a conversation about a new movie concerned with finding peace of mind, made by a director whose work has been dismissed as vague, insubstantial, and worse. Many critics jumped ship with the “vapid excess” of Marie Antoinette (06); Film Comment put it on the cover, but the accompanying article opened with the author delineating the limits to his admiration....

The Annihilation of Fish (Charles Burnett, 1999) In an amusing early scene in Charles Burnett’s 1999 The Annihilation of Fish, which is only now reaching audiences after decades without distribution, boardinghouse manager Mrs. Muldroone (Margot Kidder) asks a prospective tenant (Lynn Redgrave), “Do you have any insidious vices that I should know about? No peculiar habits?” As the viewer will come to realize over the course of this sweet romantic comedy, it is the latter half of Mrs....

Blind Pig Wants to Fly/Avatar What exactly, you might ask, do these two films have in common? Isn’t that just like Film Comment, finding a clever link between a $230 million virtual 3-D epic about blue humanoids and a no-budget Indonesian whatsit likened by its creator to a mosaic “built from shattered pieces of colored glass. Delicate, fragile, beautiful”? Well, guess what? There is no link, and they have absolutely nothing in common....

Vivian Qu, one of the few producers of independent film in China, has produced films such as Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice—winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film at this year’s Berlinale. Trap Street, her directorial debut, is a critical look at the role of technology in contemporary life that follows a digital-mapping engineer who becomes fascinated with a beautiful woman he spots in the street. The woman works at a mysterious place called Forest Lane that can’t be registered into the digital map system, and as the engineer’s curiosity about the woman intertwines with his concern about the system, the trap of the title reveals new dimensions....

It’s been barely two months since the U.S. theatrical release of his alien-invasion thriller Before We Vanish (which premiered last year at Cannes), but Kiyoshi Kurosawa is already set to begin shooting his next project: a Japan-Uzbekistan co-production titled To the Ends of the Earth. Described as a “drama of personal growth” by co-producers Jason Gray and Eiko Mizuno-Gray, the film charts the coming of age of a young Japanese woman as she travels across Uzbekistan filming a variety show....

When we first meet Eddie Coopersmith, the extraordinary protagonist of writer-director Dustin Defa’s first feature Bad Fever, the camera follows him from behind: a tall frame in a huddled posture, head down, matted long hair, baseball cap, hurrying into a gas station mini-mart. Then we watch the tail lights of his sinister black car, driving slowly, braking often, exhaust billowing into the cold. When we see his face, it is through the dingy windshield, peering at female pedestrians over a pile of stuffed animals on his dashboard....

Wilkins, 33, is the rare experimentalist who takes a noticeable interest in writing, especially screenwriting but also detective fiction, confessional monologues, interviews, elevator pitches, and Powerpoint presentations. A former Cooper Union classmate of kindred filmmakers Gabriel Abrantes and Alexander Carver, the Maine native co-wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming follow-up to the much-lauded Fort Buchanan (15) directed by Benjamin Crotty. He is a canny conceptualist who explores race, Hollywood, the Internet, and a host of other subjects with wit, daring and a knack for demonstrating how the various fixtures of our historical moment that we take for granted are in fact strange, funny, and worthy of further examination....

Paul Verhoeven is waiting for me in the Cary Grant Theater at Columbia’s Culver City studio, and I wonder if the irony delights him. Ten years ago, he was a director of internationally successful Dutch art films (Soldier of Orange, Spetters) who hit a blind alley inside his own industry. Now he’s finishing the mix on one of the most expensive movies in the history of Hollywood, with one of the biggest stars in the world (Arnold Schwarzenegger), on the studio lot that once helped midwife the movie he has several times called an all-time favorite: William Wyler’s 1959 version of Ben-Hur....

Chulas Fronteras (Les Blank and Chris Strachwitz, 1976) Midway through Les Blank’s invigorating, joyful 1976 doc Chulas Fronteras (“Beautiful Borders”), la leyenda Lydia Mendoza—sitting in a colorful kitchen, surrounded by bowls of masa and chiles, ingredients for tamales—declares: “For me, whether I’m singing a corrido, a waltz, a bolero, a polka, or whatever—when I sing that song, it feels like I’m living that moment. I feel what I’m singing. That’s how I feel for every song I sing....

Images from Saturday Night at the Baths (David Buckley, 1975) It may be not large enough to constitute a subgenre, but gay cinema of the ’70s and early ’80s is its own contained world, as was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS period it represents. If one of the great values of film is its capacity to capture a moment in time for posterity, then such fiction films as A Very Natural Thing (1974), with its Fire Island and Provincetown interludes, Nighthawks (1978), an invaluable depiction of the London gay scene, Taxi zum Klo (1981), good-naturedly immersed in West Berlin gay culture, and even William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), with its unforgettable descent into New York’s leather/S&M bars—modeled on defunct establishments like Ramrod, Anvil, and Mineshaft—are beyond worthy, as documentaries of places and spaces once marginalized, some of them gone....

Few things will rankle a true scholar of queerness more than the perception that a given work is peddling normality. The long-held wisdom is that queer art and theory get their power from existing outside of traditional heteronormative life cycles and principles, and that to completely integrate queer people into the mainstream is to dilute our difference and therefore strip us of identity. Of course, this leads us to the great political irony: that progress for LGBT people in the U....

“All that has to be said is you have never seen a movie like this before now. You will likely never see one like it again. With Charlie Kaufman’s writing and Michel Gondry’s direction, the audience starts at the end of the story, works its way backwards to the beginning then folds in on itself in a seamless story about love and loss. Comic. Visual. Compelling. Fantastic acting from all on screen and a story which will leave you breathless but wanting more....

Ishiro Honda, best known for helming Godzilla (1954), spent a large part of his film career working as assistant director to Mikio Naruse, Akira Kurosawa (his slightly younger best friend), and other luminaries of Japan’s cinematic golden age. His greatest teacher however, was Kajiro Yamamoto, a career studio director who didn’t garner critical praise on the level of Yasujiro Ozu or Naruse. Yamamoto is notable for planting the seeds for the next generation that would bring Japanese film to worldwide audiences, serving as mentor to Kurosawa and Honda....

The Red Light Bandit Observed through the prism of the 20th century, the avant-garde, be it artistic or cinematic, is usually associated with the Western hemisphere. A mix of provincial ignorance and patronizing presumption has prevented the “civilized world” from looking at the “third world” as capable of deconstructing its own culture, of consciously tweaking its representational codes. While “we” usually are makers of culture, “they” often are prisoners of their own culture, which can either be backward or naïve, pure or foul, scary or amusing—in any case, never self-aware....

European filmmakers have always been quicker to recognize the possibilities of television than their American counterparts. Bergman, Fassbinder and Godard made some of their finest work for the small screen, often editing the result for U.S. exhibition. (More recent examples of this trend include Raul Ruiz’s magisterial Mysteries of Lisbon and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s occasionally thrilling yet finally unsatisfying Penance.) But though they are structured in some respects like TV series, carefully parceling their action out into coherent stand-alone episodes, films like Fanny and Alexander or Berlin Alexanderplatz tend to move more like movies....