Sometimes a movie just comes right along and punches a hole in your gut, and for me, Vampyr was just such a movie. Like any halfway decent connoisseur of paranormal horror and inordinately artsy European films, I’ve known about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film for ages, but somehow I’d managed to go without seeing […]
As much as anybody can be, Jean-Pierre Léaud is the face of the French New Wave, and thus it is well that he so dominates Jean Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece The Mother and the Whore, a three and a half hour monolith that stands Janus-faced as both the last film of that movement and perhaps the […]
Looking back at what I’ve written in this series over the past few weeks, I noticed that for a month now, I’ve only reviewed black-and-white movies: happy ones, sad ones, violent ones, funny ones, American ones, foreign ones: all very good and all monochromatic. It was time for what we sober types in the business […]
By the time we get to the scene where a wealthy widower has drugged his niece, a nun-in-training wearing his dead wife’s bridal grown, and is nuzzling her breasts with his face while she lies as still as a corpse, it’s pretty clear that Viridiana is a sort of unique movie. By the time, about […]
A film with few precursors and few successors, The Battle of Algiers practically demands the use of hyperbole, so here I go: this is one of the most unique films in history, freely blending cinéma vérité inspired faux-documentary, psychological profiling, social commentary, Marxist anti-colonialism, horrifying violence, and good old-fashioned raw emotional power that all add […]
The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him, it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images; but it never worked. He wrote me, ‘One day, I’ll have to […]
Historically, there have been three great masters of Japanese cinema: Mizoguchi Kenji, Ozu Yasujiro and Kurosawa Akira. I do hope that the latter two need no introduction – Kurosawa in particular standing alongside Federico Fellini and perhaps Ingmar Bergman as one of the most famous of all non-English language filmmakers. But Mizoguchi – by far […]
“Le film, c’est le monde. Vraiment, en une heure et demi, en une heure quarante, voir le monde.” -Jean-Luc Godard [“The film is the world. Truly, in an hour and a half, you see the world,”] In the opening moments of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au hasard Balthazar* something remarkable happens that sets the tone […]
It has mostly been the case that this blog does not trade in the review and analysis of classic films, for any number of good and bad reasons. But a perfect storm of impulses struck me in the last couple of weeks, and thus I find myself launching a new feature that I will play […]
