Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

An older review of this film can be found here. It is not demanding more of The Tree of Life than it can withstand to call it the defining film of Terrence Malick’s whole life. From the moment he first began drafting the script to what was then called Q, in 1978, it was fully […]

Despite its gloriously fervid title, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (winner of the 2010 Palme d’Or, mainstay of last fall’s festival season, but some of us just didn’t get to be the cool kids last year) strikes me as being the most mainstream, I daresay normal, film yet made by Thailand’s reigning […]

I like to imagine that Jacques Demy first thought up The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a direct response to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1961 A Woman Is a Woman. That film, a splashy Technicolor Cinemascope musical, was also every inch a Godard film: amiably cynical, eager to tear itself apart and reveal all of the ways that […]

There are so many words you could use to describe the work of Michael Haneke: bold, provocative, cruel, cold, intellectual, confusing, cryptic, frustrating, alienating, disturbing, exhilarating. He’s a bit of a wild boy like that. There’s one word that not only would I never have used, I’d have denied the possibility I might ever feel […]

Last week, I said of An Angel at My Table, it was “a brilliant work by a woman who was by now in full command of her powers.” Ha ha! How very young and naïve I was last week! I mean, I still think An Angel at My Table is a pretty moving, powerful motion […]

In Laurent Cantet’s The Class (Entre les murs, or “Between the Walls” in the original French), there is a Parisian teacher named François who wants very badly to help his students become the smartest and best people they can be. Those students – 14 and 15-year-olds from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds – do […]

The late Imamura Shohei is the kind of filmmaker who is too easily described as underrated, in spite of the evidence. The fact is, Imamura is very well-rated indeed; he’s quite probably the internationally best-known Japanese director of his generation. But for those of us who love his work, it doesn’t seem right that he […]

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 […]

My intent had been to start out this project with the highest-ranked film on the TSPDT list that I’ve never seen, but #64, Erich von Stroheim’s epic Greed, is not presently available on DVD, and I have no access to a videocassette player. So I’ve had to go for a back-up: the second-highest-ranked film that […]

The festival and art house crowd might be excused for declaring a Romanian New Wave on the basis of what amounts to just three films in as many years, for those three films are all pretty amazing: Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu, winner of the 2005 Un Certain Regard at Cannes; Corneliu Porumboiu’s […]

In honor of last week’s closing ceremony of the 60th Cannes Festival (give or take), in which the 52nd Palme d’Or was awarded to the Romanian 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, I have taken it upon myself to consider a previous winner of that most august prize. My first observation about Dancer in […]

“If we dare to tell the truth about the past, perhaps we shall dare tell the truth about the present.” -Ken Loach, 2006 Cannes Film Festival “A bullet pierced my true love’s side in life’s young spring so early And on my breast in blood she died while soft winds shook the barley.” -Robert Dwyer […]