“Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Adapted from the eponymous 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as stylized and artful as it is inadequate and muddled. The compelling story of the book, about a mother’s experiences with her serial-killer-to-be psychopathic son, undergoes in the film a diffusing of…
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How well do the members of a family really know one another? A Sunday in the Country seeks to dredge up from a distant, indistinct, but halcyon past the feelings and memories of one family convening for a day outside Paris toward the end of the summer of 1912, with the far-off rumble of thunder as the uncertainty of the…
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“What does marble think when it’s being sculpted? It thinks, ‘I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost.’ Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” The ancient myth of the spouses Orpheus and Eurydice has a time-honored and immemorial place in the arts, in literature, and during the twentieth century in the cinema, where Jean Cocteau put to use his…
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As a finely stylized Japanese film of the Jidaigeki genre, a period piece like so many of its samurai brethren, The Ballad of Narayama stands out nonetheless as an early amalgam of the theater and the cinema. It is an artful filming of the eponymous novella by the Japanese writer Shichirô Fukazawa, itself adapted from the Japanese legend of the…