The style of put-‘em-up scuffles erupting from time to time in The Strawberry Blonde, directed by Raoul Walsh, is a glove-like fit for the belligerent character assigned to the impressive, balletic, and pent-up James Cagney, who had a background as a dancer segueing into his film career that shows in his powerful, tightly coiled movements. That character, Biff Grimes, is supposed to be a dentist...
In the fourth part of Albert Camus’ humane and heartfelt masterpiece, The Plague, taking place in the French port of Oran on the Algerian coast, there is a moment of quiet surprise following a scene where an innocent child lets out a final, death-rattling wail as he expires in a hospital ward, tortured to the end by the deadly bacillus that is overtaking the town like a wildfire tearing into the...
The close-set and benign features on the face of the Italian actor Ninetto Davoli seem to incarnate stupidity more completely than in any other actor that I’ve ever seen. It is almost uncanny, the perfect embodiment of a trait not always easy to bring out—and not always gratifying to bring to life as an actor, to be sure. But Davoli does it, and so utterly that I’ve moved beyond seeing in his...
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 early in his career as a madman...
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 can be magical; the laid-back...
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 rubber baron Carlos Fermín...
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 already pointed out, can serve as the ultimate self-help book...
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 more versatile as a...
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 all in Teorema, beyond the piquant provocations of a slew of...
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 rich...