By the time Ingmar Bergman directed Waiting Women, released in the autumn of 1952, it had been almost two years since he’d made a movie. I don’t want to go all the way as far saying “and you can tell”, because there are ample strengths here. But there’s also a bit of stiffness in the […]
No film has ever deserved its reputation less than How Green Was My Valley, an adaptation by Philip Dunne of Richard Llewellyn’s 1939 novel that carefully balances gooey nostalgic sentiment and troubling clarity, is one of the most beautifully-shot films of the 1940s, and represents one of the highest achievements of John Ford’s career-long fascination […]
The release date might say that we’re in the bright and shiny new decade of the 1990s, but everything about Bloodmoon feels hungover from the ’80s in the most mortifying way. Not least of these things – indeed, arguably foremost among these things – it is a slasher film, plain and simple, and it took […]
The early part of 1951 was a dire period for Ingmar Bergman, certainly the most professionally uncertain period of his life prior to his tussle with the Swedish government over taxes in the 1970s, and the self-imposed exile from his home country that followed. And even then, he was Ingmar Bergman, International Treasure, and well […]
1992’s live-action/animation hybrid Cool World is the most juvenile kind of edgy Nineties nonsense, the kind that takes something wholesome and something sordid and self-consciously mashes them together just for the same of having done it. In this case, it is a movie whose animating principle (as it were) is to ask the question, and […]
Pete Davidson is a prickly, sad, and a tough person to be around. The reason I know this is that Davidson’s entire professional identity is built around defining himself as prickly, sad, and tough to be around. And now we have him as the lead actor in an entire semi-autobiographical feature film that he co-wrote, […]
Summer Interlude was the first film directed by Ingmar Bergman that he was entirely happy to have made. That’s enough to grab my attention, at least, and while there’s no reason we have to agree with him (filmmakers have been getting their own films wrong since the beginning), it’s still worth pondering what about the […]
