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“Drowning By Numbers” (1988) is the kind of movie that dares you to look away, yet it is impossible. Every frame pulls you in, teeming with an intense visual wit and a playful morbidity that lingers long after the credits roll. This is another film that once I start watching, I can’t turn it off. Directed by Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker known for his baroque sensibilities, this movie is arguably one of his most accessible works. “Drowning By Numbers” is a cerebral puzzle with a lot of emotional depth, and if you’ve never seen a Greenaway film before, this is the perfect place to start. This was the first Greenaway film that I watched, and I was hooked ever since.

I’m a longtime fan of Peter Greenaway. His films have a way of making you feel like you’re really in his world, as if you’re watching...

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark takes a feature-length beat to honor fringe cinema in the streaming age.

First, the spoiler-free pitch for one editor’s midnight movie pick — something weird and wonderful from any age of film that deserves our memorializing.

Then, the spoiler-filled aftermath as experienced by the unwitting editor attacked by this week’s recommendation.

The Pitch: The Swan, The Twins, Their Wives, and Their Deaths

The line between midnight movies and arthouse cinema has always been blurrier than we might like to believe. Both niches exist to accommodate creators (and their fans) who crave something different from conventional Hollywood fare and are willing to seek out unorthodox screening options like festivals and independent theaters in order to scratch that itch. And while they have both produced plenty of forgettable fare from artists who became too comfortable existing in yesterday’s version of transgression — we’ve all...

Greenaway is being honoured at this week’s IDFA festival in Amsterdam.

Peter Greenaway is not a face to normally be found at a creative documentary festival like International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

However, the director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover (1989) and A Zed And Two Noughts (1985), both screening at the festival as part of a Greenaway retrospective, has always blurred genre boundaries.

His work combines elements of art history, anthropology and magical realism - and he has made both documentaries and mockumentaries. Greenaway lives in the Netherlands and has strong Dutch connections. Perhaps, then,...

Peter Greenaway is the one who turned down “Roger Rabbit.”

The “Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover” provocateur claimed in a new interview with Vulture that he was the first director approached to take on 1988’s live-action/animated hybrid classic “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

“There were people knocking on my door all the time,” Greenaway said. “And looking back, do you remember a film called ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ I was the first director asked to actually film that. Would you believe that? I found that absolutely extraordinary.”

He continued, “I think that was because of a Hollywood agent who didn’t really understand my cinema at all. God bless him. But I was the name to conjure with for six months. So he threw me in there, and I managed to be one of the first directors to actually read the script.”

Eventually, Robert Zemeckis helmed the...

From Haneke to Von Trier, the arthouse provocateur has a long, grim history. But there’s a thin line between trauma and tedium

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it was during The Painted Bird that I got the giggles. Most likely it happened somewhere between the child being buried up to his neck to be pecked at by crows, and the cats licking a pair of eyeballs freshly gouged from a man’s head with a spoon. Once a paedophile had met his death at the bottom of a rat-filled well and a goat had been decapitated by a boy who had discovered it was sleeping with his lover, the film had become an arthouse equivalent of the old Four Yorkshiremen sketch with its steeply competing hardships: “Tossed in t’well wi’ rats? We used to dream o’ being tossed in t’well wi’ rats …”

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LONDON -- House star Hugh Laurie was awarded an Order of the British Empire award in the Queen's New Year's Honors list, it was announced Monday.

The British actor was recognized for his contribution to drama in a career that has spanned over 20 years. The actor began his career as a sketch comedian in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and later played a series of English upper class twits in such shows as Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder before crossing the pond to take U.S. audiences by storm as the curmudgeonly but brilliant medic.

Also honored in the Royal list was director Peter Greenaway who was named a Commander of the British Empire for a career featuring such textured and intricate films as The Draughtman's Contract, Drowning by Numbers, A Zed and Two Noughts and Prospero's Books.

Other leading media figures named in the annual honors list include singer Rod Stewart, television actress Penelope Keith and former Ofcom chief executive Stephen Carter, who were awarded CBEs.