A glorious, suspenseful film told in flashback, Harakiri delivers a potent and gut-wrenching ethical message that has lost none of its thrust, released though it was more than fifty years ago, and dealing with subject matter dating to the early seventeenth century of the Edo period. It is a samurai film, a storied “jidaigeki” with critical acclaim; but it is also a coup de grâce delivered to the...
A variant of the earlier Late Spring, which features the hallowed and iconic actress, Setsuko Hara, alongside the mainstay of its director, Chishû Ryû, An Autumn Afternoon still has its own unique claim to individuality, and it is no less moving than its predecessor. If I had to choose between them (a difficult choice since both are moving masterpieces) I would watch An Autumn Afternoon, saving...
Caché is one example of a film whose magisterial technical skills vie with the vaguely spurious, implausible substance of the story and its characters. The result is a film that I can admire, without feeling compelled to call it “art”; despite having much that is redeemable, Caché comes up short, leaving a bad taste in the mouth that is the worse because it is so well-made and magisterial. I have...
Of the many characters played by the nonpareil Humphrey Bogart, that of In a Lonely Place, Dixon Steele, most hints at the hard-bitten malevolence underlying his shtick as the “tough guy” of the movies, just as it suggests the nature of the man himself and his own tendencies. Humphrey Bogart plays a burned-out screenwriter manqué, Dixon Steele, who tends toward violent outbursts that are as...
Taken to the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, a former member of the French Resistance is sentenced to death after a protracted imprisonment. He has hatched plans of escape, and a fellow prisoner by the name of Orsini has tried—and failed—to escape using his own plans. The countdown to his execution, after stalling for many months, makes every succeeding day a trial of uncertainty and fear; in the...
Inaugurating the late period of his creative production, Late Spring bears those hallmarks that were to acquire worldwide renown, the signature of the Japanese master craftsman, Yasujirô Ozu: waist-high static shots above the tatami mat; long takes lingering on the composed resignation of the characters; “pillow shots” as exterior cutaways to the environs; the glacial, deliberate pacing that sees...
A slow-moving depiction of class decay and the coming of modernity, The Music Room, directed by Satyajit Ray, is as pleasing and substantial a film as those of The Apu Trilogy. It features Chhabi Biswas as an aging nobleman landowner during the last days of a preindustrial culture whose ways have long been decaying. This decay and industrialization, represented by the low-class and boorish Mahim...
A fond and evocative re-creation of its forebear as directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre still contains all the hallmarks of its director, Werner Herzog. Like Murnau’s film, Herzog’s is a period piece that shifts between the Transylvanian highlands marauded by the sinister, malicious Count Dracula, and the sleepy port city of Wismar (filmed in Delft, Netherlands); like that film, this...
A creepy, crawling, and slimy world of night visions, body horror, and psychosis, Eraserhead was the first feature-length film of the American surrealist David Lynch. It is dreamlike, immersive, and lucid even as it remains illogical and murky, willing to dive into its own darkness with pleased, decadent abandon. Like a pudgier version of a young Emil Cioran, Jack Nance plays Henry Spencer as a...
Unraveling as a disturbed allegory eluding explanation, a satire of the unstated, a madcap domestic fantasy, Dogtooth is a provocative and peculiar film that pokes fun at the family as a modern, exclusive, deviant microcosm following its own rules and strictures. This modern Greek family, residing in a desolate exurbia of gated properties, is doubtless stranger than those families that come to...