Slow and inexorable, Andrew Dominik’s Assassination of Jesse James follows America’s favorite Western villainous hero to his end, the bullet in the back he receives from the boy who idolizes him, Bob Ford. That fatal shot resolves the ambivalence of either figure: James, a psychotic, for the torment of having an illusion of controlling the […]

Terry Zwigoff came to prominence with a documentary about cartoonist Robert Crumb (Crumb, 1994). He segued into fictional filmmaking by directing from a script by another such artist, Daniel Clowes, and himself. The protagonist, a new high school graduate, is herself such an artist, whose “diary” consists of comic book sketches of people she comes […]