"The Ice Storm" scrutinizes a suburban family's travails at the height of the 1970s in upper-middle-class Connecticut. Given the film's intense exploration of the period and the locale, it comes as a surprise that this poignantly accurate piece was directed by a native of Taiwan who only arrived in t

Beautiful , Domestic, Eclectic, Sensual, Serene

In 1999, when Ann Hui was asked how she'd been spending her time, she replied that she'd been teaching. Was she on the faculty at the London Film School (her alma mater), or perhaps at some prestigious American university? No. Surprisingly, Hui was not working in film at all -- instead, she was payin

Dramatic, Eclectic, Elegant, Epic, Mainland chinese (the 5th generation), Sincere

"I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are eclectic," wrote Pauline Kael, the undisputed queen of journalistic film criticism. Born in tiny Petaluma, California, Kael went

Eclectic, In-your-face, Smart, Witty

Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose work resists facile classifications such as Postmodern or Poststructural. Indeed, the concept at the core of his methodology -- if we can still use that word -- is difference. According to the odd logic of difference, a thing -- a text, a chair, a concep

Discourse as event, Eclectic, Event, Hallucinatory, Kinetic, Pop, Poststructuralism, Psychedelic, Quirky, Repetition, Round, Trippy