As one New York film festival ends (Tribeca), attention turns across the East River to the New York borough of Brooklyn where another cinema celebration has been unveiled. In only its third year, the BAMcinemaFest, presented by BAMcinématek at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, has become an important film event on the cultural calendar and a festival with a reputation for innovative programming. The third annual BAMcinemaFest, which runs June 16 to 26, will present 19 New Yo...

  While Alfred Hitchcock will forever be known as the "master of suspense", one of his true admirers, the director Brian De Palma, also shares the master's abiding interest and superb execution of the thriller genre. If anything, De Palma was able to be much more explicit in the depiction of violence and sexality than Hitchcock was able to do in the more buttoned-down decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In many ways, De Palma combines the classic elements of less-is-more film sus...

THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED You've heard of the Warner brothers and the Baldwin brothers.....well, make way for the Safdie brothers, the directorial team of Benny and Josh Safdie, American indie's dynamic duo. The BAMcinématek located at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York has turned the asylum over to the inmates for the eclectic film series titled Emotional Sloppy Manic Cinema: Films Directed and Selected by Benny and Josh Safdie. The series, a collection of 19...

 The past few years has seen a steady revival of interest in classic Japanese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, with a stream of retrospectives and the issues of DVD packages devoted to the works of such films masters as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenzi Mizoguchi and Shohei Imamura. The latest Japanese director to get the revival treatment is Nagisa Oshima, widely considered a major force in world cinema for his provocative films of the 1960s and 1970s. A national tour of Oshima’s work has opened at the Bro...