For anyone who missed The Proposition in the cinema recently, I’d seriously recommend it. It’s released in various US cities over the coming weeks (if anyone reading this is based there) and there’s an excellent interview with Nick Cave, who wrote it, on Salon this week. The DVD is set for release on this side of the Atlantic in July.

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You know it's hard out here for a pimp. It's even harder, let me tell you, for a whore.

Los Angeles Times: A writer unblocked

On first viewing, Atanarjuat is perplexing. The opening is elliptical, stirring a nagging sense that readers of subtitles are being left out of the whole picture.

Unlike the typical foreign-language film-viewing experience, the number of syllables uttered by Atanarjuat's actors doesn't correspond with the basic sentences printed along the bottom of the screen. The actors are inexpressive compared with those in mainstream movies, particularly in the close-up, the shot that lifted the cinematic form from carnival curiosity to mass entertainment. Indeed, the whole film defies classical shot structures: typically, there is no establishing master shot but rather one continuous shot that is broken by jump-cuts and cutaways. As for what is actually happening, no one gets it the first time through: Something bad is taking place but you're not certain what it is. Yet the rhythm, once established, is mesmerizing. It's like listening to Kunuk speak, like being there.

The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

Starring as the ultimate pinup in The Notorious Bettie Page, Gretchen Mol sheds her clothes, her inhibitions, and her flash-in-the-pan image

THE NAKED TRUTH ABOUT GRETCHEN MOL: GQ Features on men.style.com

The divine dark comedy of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu | LA Weekly

Nick Cave talks about writing, morality and his tough new movie.

Beyond the Multiplex

Nobel laureate Jose Saramago returns to the scene of his haunting last novel to satirize the incompetence of government hacks.

'Seeing' | Salon.com Books

The western may be lost to us as any sort of sustained tradition, but as the titles Unforgiven, Dead Man, and A History of Violence suggest, it intermittently returns as an unquiet ghost—this week in an Australian variant, The Proposition.

Village Voice on The Proposition

Page had "it," a photographic quality that resists being put into words. Like Marilyn Monroe, Page's images have a tactile impression -- as if you could reach out and touch her just from looking at a two-dimensional photo. Mol superbly replicates the way Page's personality comes through her modeling work. In her early photo shoots, she's amusingly self-conscious and silly when she tries to look "pert" or "haughty," but becomes more confident and playful the more popular she becomes.

The Devil and Bettie Page

The haunting Belgian drama L'Enfant recalls other timeless films about human desperation: Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, about a neglected French schoolboy, and Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, about a father driven to commit a crime to escape poverty.

Like those films, L'Enfant's greatest triumph is inserting viewers into the hopelessness and desperate scramble to survive that define the lives of its characters -- who are young, poor, homeless residents of the bleak Belgian steel town of Seraing. L'Enfant, which received the Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or in 2005, is a glimpse into lives defined by the kind of quotidian despair that has settled so deeply into its characters's bones, it has become second nature.

And baby makes three