Alongside Akira Kurosawa's customarily virile athletic work, this slow, contemplative movie is apt to be seen all the more clearly as an old man's movie, a movie made with a reduced pulse rate and a tenacious, almost desperate attempt to savor every passing moment. At bottom, it is a My …
Not the first project that Buñuel undertook in France, but the one that signalled his thorough Frenchification: more refinement, more elegance, more finesse. The Octave Mirbeau novel, which Renoir had adapted into a synthetic Hollywood production in 1946, was felt by some (perhaps predominantly Renoir partisans) to be too Buñuelian …
Robert Bresson's truly, not falsely, pious treatment of the Georges Bernanos novel about a dying village priest (the sad-faced yet childish Claude Laydu) whose parishioners don't understand him. It occupies the most advantageous position in Bresson's output, the spot where his minimalist style has already been fully refined but not …
Kurosawa, working for the first time in color (not counting the single dash of pink in the otherwise black-and-white High and Low), constructs an audaciously colored mosaic of a Japanese shanty-town — a basically muddy gray landscape brightened here and there by the gaudy hues of the slum dwellers' costumes, …
King Hu’s masterwork is guaranteed to out-Marvel any of the major blockbusters on this summer’s release schedule. Hearken back to 1457 AD, a time when hard-hearted eunuchs governed China. The country's most powerful undercover operations have been divided in two: the Imperial Guard, dressed in white, and their black-clad counterparts, …
Cops-and-robbers stuff, stripped to the barest essentials of the genre, reduced to the irreducible, abstracted to no more than the bluesy mood and the methodical, calculated, chess-game maneuvers. The nearly monochromatic color and uncluttered compositions conjure up a poetic night world somewhat in the manner of "Whistler's nocturnes." Writer-director Walter …
Elia Kazan's variation on the Cain-and-Abel theme: an accursed ne'er-do-well and his blessed goody-goody brother compete with one another under the stern, critical eye of their Bible-thumping father. The color and the locales (in John Steinbeck's California, circa World War I) are perceived with the same wide-eyed wonder as the …
In the "Love at First Sight" Department, it’s been twelve years since the Latino Film Festival introduced me to Pablo Larrain via his second feature Tony Manero, a picture I never tire of watching and championing. This year Larrain acquaints audiences with Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), the reggaeton sensation with …
Mastectomies as subject matter are, not surprisingly, a hard sell. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the first time Hollywood breached the subject was the small screen 1978 biopic, First, You Cry starring Mary Tyler Moore as news correspondent Betty Rollin. Some 22 years earlier, Kinuyo Tanaka’s The Eternal Breasts …
Luis Buñuel in his most cryptic mood: no clues and no clarifications. The elegant party guests in a high-rent Mexico City neighborhood adjourn to the living room after dinner and, for days following, are unable to leave the room, and are fitfully perplexed and exasperated by their peculiar inability. Buñuel …
Georges Franju's macabre masterpiece, originally released in the U.S. with English dubbing under the title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, an elegant, graceful, stately, almost ceremonial variation on the mad-scientist theme. A megalomaniacal plastic surgeon (the stocky, stolid Pierre Brasseur), responsible for his daughter's facial disfigurement, is determined to …
What Carlos Saura did for the art of flamenco and tango in films called Flamenco and Tango, he now sets out to do for that soulful Portuguese folk song, dating back to the early 19th Century, the fado. A spacious and spare studio, translucent partitions, process screens, backdrops, mirrors, colored …
Above and beyond all else, around and through all else, the Coen brothers have assembled here a timeless document on their native state, Minnesota. On its notorious winters. On its snow shovels and its ice scrapers (implement of an uproarious temper tantrum). On its parkas and mittens and gloves and …
Not knowing the box he bid on contained the negatives of an uncharted street photographer whose pictures would later become his own private money-spinner, geeky Chicago real estate agent John Maloof hit artistic and financial paydirt after essentially purchasing a stranger’s life at auction. Vivian Maier, an eccentric serial nanny …
They were the world's only volcanologist couple, and it was their mutual passion that ultimately brought about their demise. The love shared by Katia and Maurice Krafft wasn’t going to burn out of them, it was only going to get hotter. They saw a side of the planet few will …