Carlos Valladares

Carlos Valladares reminisces, in this personal essay, about the director’s films.

Carlos Valladares explores the gangster film genre, tracing the conventions and evolutions in the form from the exuberance of Raoul Walsh's THE ROARING TWENTIES (1939) to the heavy silence of Martin Scorsese's THE IRISHMAN (2019).

Ekphrastic essay on the films of the American independent director Jim Jarmusch and three qualities that give his work their poetic power: Drift, Allusion, Repetition.

Reviews of 'Da 5 Bloods,' 'Fourteen,' 'Shirley,' 'The Portuguese Woman,' and films by Sergei Parajanov for n+1.

From October 2016 to March 2017, I prepared and curated an exhibition for the Anderson Collection, a museum of modern and contemporary American art in Stanford, California. The exhibit, “Abstraction and the Movies,” took inspiration from film critic Manny Farber and Stanford art history professor Alexander Nemerov, with whom I developed the exhibition. I chose posters and film stills from a range of movies, and hung them up next to the works of Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock & Mark Rothko. I wrote the wall labels, explaining why I had paired this movie with that painting.

This video essay looks at the color red in the musicals, comedies, and melodramas of the American director Vincente Minnelli. Made as part of a class at Stanford University, "The Video Essay," Fall 2017. Selected for competition in the 54th Pesaro Film Festival. Presented by Metrograph Pictures, a cinema in New York City.

Carlos Valladares writes on Kelly Reichardt’s films, exploring the director’s interest in subtle details and care for complex characters.

This December, a pillar of American cinema is being re-released. “Daughters of the Dust,” the 1991 debut of independent director Julie Dash, has been restored and will be distributed by the Cohen Film Collection in theaters across America. In this era of Black Lives Matter, Beyonce’s “Lemonade”, Kendrick and the return of D’Angelo, the re-release of Dash’s film deserves to be greeted with cheers and trumpet blasts.

Joan Micklin Silver’s work will outlive her now-dying nation.

I wrote a feature on the cinema of the Italian director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini, the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at the Metrograph theater in New York City. I appear on pg. 96.

Carlos Valladares writes on filmmaker and photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s prolific career.

For eleven years, from 1968 to 1979, Richard Serra created a collection of films and videos that felt out the uncharted phenomenological boundaries of the medium. Carlos Valladares explores a selection of these works. In conjunction with my article in the Fall 2019 Gagosian Quarterly, Gagosian will present all of Serra's moving-image work at Anthology Film Archives in October.

One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Robert Altman’s cinema, his delicate understanding of losers and outcasts, can be summed up in one shot in Nashville (1975).

One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. French New Wave director François Truffaut encapsulated in a single shot from "Stolen Kisses" (1968).

James Cagney, especially in his sound-drunk 1930s films, was a physical acting virtuoso: fast-paced, graceful, streetwise and effortless.