Richard Gere’s Leonard Fife, the unreliable narrator at the core of Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada (Kino, $23.96 Blu-ray, $15.96 DVD), is seldom without a woman in his life. Yet he shares plenty in common with the brooding loners of the director’s recent de facto trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener: the tendency toward self-flagellation, the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Hardcore’ is an ethnographic odyssey into a bygone culture
If you feel like you need a shower after watching Paul Schrader’s 1979 crime drama Hardcore (newly reissued on Blu-ray, Kino Lorber, $17.42), then the movie has done its job. Skeevy even by Schrader standards, Hardcore germinated the same year as Scrader’s celebrated screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, and it feels cut from the same sordid cloth — and imbued with the … [Read more...]
Faith of the father, test of our time: Schrader’s powerful ‘First Reformed’
The setting for much of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is a white Dutch Colonial church, simple and sturdy and indistinguishable from the thousands of similar structures that punctuate America’s hills and hollers, its exurbs and suburbs. The chapel, First Reformed in upstate New York, is situated near Abundant Life, a pyrotechnic megachurch with live-streamed sermons and … [Read more...]