If ever the well-worn idea of Stockholm syndrome were to have a Spanish equivalent, complete with the passionate flair of the urban landscape and the compact but spacious flats and apartments, it would have to be that of this mid-career movie directed by Pedro Almodóvar with his frank drollery, darkness, and humor. Átame is a blast, featuring an Antonio Banderas…
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There are many things to be said about the Before trilogy, among them the impressive range of its defining qualities: the long tracking shots of extended dialogue in which both Jesse and Céline, played with natural charisma and chemistry by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, take up the threads of a floating and often capricious conversation and weave something that…
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Somewhere in the Amazon basin, an isthmus between the Urubamba and Camisea Rivers serves as the principal location for the feat of dragging a boat over a mountain, captured on film by Werner Herzog in his true-to-life creation Fitzcarraldo. It is a strange, obsessive, somewhat outré take on the historical legend from which the movie takes its so-called inspiration, the…
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Proust—what an author, eh? He can be difficult to dig into, and not only because his work can give rise to an infamous snobbery, an ironic response to an author that made much of his undying contempt for snobbery. He can also inspire so much thinking and self-reflection that his winding tome, as many of his critics and readers have…
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The Tramp has to be the most imperishable character in the history of physical comedy. Buster Keaton, his stoic and graceful attitude toward the beleaguered lives of his characters, his immense poise in the midst of disaster, the well-thought-out stunts and set designs—his might have been a greater talent. And Harold Lloyd might have been more entertaining, more daring, and…
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After watching Teorema, I get the feeling that one of the rivals of the image-focused cinema of Ingmar Bergman in the twentieth century was the renegade and iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini, who with the image of a face, a body, a sudden movement, or a stony silence was often able to draw out the stunning intensity of a character. Above…
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Could it be that the mainspring of the behavior of our delightful twenty-something protagonist, Frances Ha, is a kind of innocuous solipsism? The walled-in world of her self-esteem, her occasional self-amusement suggesting that she’s getting along in the world despite its harshness and cruel indifference, her ability to dance down the street with a lithely flying, pirouetting body in those…
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As directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise raises an important question: if the entire milieu in which he finds himself is one steeped in suavity, refinement, the old-world elegance of the jet-setting crowd, what are the limits of a man’s suavity? Surely you can only become so refined and smooth-talking before you simply refine yourself out of reality, like…