Author Archives: Ted Shen

A mixed bag of recent shorts. Erica Peng’s Orange Juice and Knitting Needles is a tender meditation on the filmmaker’s aged grandparents, their six-decade-long marriage, and the Buddhist spirituality that infuses their everyday lives. Diana Logreira’s I’m the One Who Suffers but I’m Still the King is a sincere but amateurish documentary about a Colombian […]

NR • 1 hour 35 min

A maniac in a supermarket eviscerates all the help: “Blood spill on aisle four!” etc. Scott Spiegel directed this 1989 feature; with Sam Raimi as one of the hapless victims and a brief cameo by Bruce Campbell. 90 min.

Civil War western involving “nudity and rape,” an example of the period subgenre purportedly called the “roughie” (1969); Lee Frost directed. 94 min.

A rancher struggles with the loss of his wife and daughter in this 30-minute short by John Versical and Bryan Carmody.

Bollywood screen idol Rekha plays the title character, a girl abducted by greedy neighbors and sold to a brothel in faraway Lucknow who grows up to become a celebrated courtesan. After falling in love with the scion of a respectable family, whose social status makes marriage between them impossible, the heroine defies her madam and […]

An earnest tribute to showmanship, this 2000 documentary by Allan Miller traces the uneasy collaboration between two strong-minded artists—conductor Zubin Mehta and filmmaker Zhang Yimou (House of Flying Daggers)—as they collaborate on a stage production of Turandot, Puccini’s opera about a cruel Chinese princess. Miller captures the clash of cultures and personalities in small but […]

A critic’s choice in the truest sense, as Reader contributor Fred Camper uses slides and experimental films to illustrate how art represents nature. The earliest work, Jean Epstein’s Le tempestaire (1947), is a textbook example of crosscutting between separate events in the service of storytelling: verite images of a storm on Cape Breton alternate with […]

This dyanamic 1924 short by Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy seems to celebrate the Industrial Age. Its rapid montage of patterns and objects—most of them of modernist design—is driven by George Antheil’s music, an unrelenting rush of percussion, player pianos, and a siren. 17 min.