About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on the suggestive challenge…
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Léolo (1992)
It is said that great art often contains an element of contextual weirdness, a bit of the outré or taboo that contributes to a lasting impression that remains with us for years, even for a lifetime. If such an adage is true, then Léolo, a film directed by the meteoric…
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Uncut Gems (2019)
Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Midtown Manhattan, pullulating with hawkers and dealers and prospective patrons, the Diamond District is a prominent interchange of the global diamond industry and an economic mecca for those intending to buy diamonds, jewelry, or various trinkets containing the same. As a bastion of brick-and-mortar…
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Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life. This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to…
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Pride and Prejudice (2005)
As if to indulge the glittering and fanciful dreams of the young, adolescent girls of the world—they’re out there, they’re hiding, they often can’t help themselves and really, I can’t see the harm in it—the long fluttering coattails of the gallant and half-savage Mr. Darcy make this man into a…
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The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Because of its adaptation from a play written by the Hungarian dramatist Miklós László, the screenplay of The Shop Around the Corner takes as its setting the wintertime streets of Budapest—at first blush a strange and even arbitrary location for a group of well-groomed and fast-talking Americans, all of whom…
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Love in the Afternoon (1972)
The image of a charming twosome, slack and romantically engaged, each leaning toward the other in one of those countless Parisian cafés to whose notability the cinema has made a profound and immemorial contribution: it is Frédéric with his potential lover Chloé, a holdover from his youth having returned to…
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Pauline at the Beach (1983)
What could be more egocentric than wanting from the sensation of another person the full throttle of desire, passion, and every shade of transcendent experience? And what could be more ridiculous, more naïve, more dreamy-eyed, and more shamelessly hopeful? And what more human? Around this and its associated myths Pauline…
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The Day After Trinity (1981)
The most astonishing thing about the man and the legend J. Robert Oppenheimer—a man whose intellectual brilliance was so prodigious that even in the top-secret and desolate expanses of Los Alamos, brimming with the most brilliant minds of the era, he was considered by all to be an intellectual superior—is…
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Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Something about seeing the svelte and dapper Cary Grant in dishabille and with fuzzy sleeves—apparently undiminished in all his glory by this exercise in the emasculating of his figure—creates a brand of giggly awe that might be peculiar to this glorious era of the classic screwball comedy, of which Bringing…
