Its frames a cold, beautiful black-and-white, squaring its aesthetic with the drained and spare post-war environment of the Polish People’s Republic, Ida is a stunningly lucid film. Its story, set in the 1960s, is a variation on the theme of the Holocaust as its shadows lingered over the decades that came after it. With the draining of colors and the crisp static shots that populate the film—many of them drenched with a weak, almost weeping…
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Charlie Chaplin, the director of his mid-career film The Circus, was a libertine and a rake. A diminutive ladies’ man, he was having multiple affairs as the film was in production, going through a divorce settlement with his underage wife, and facing back taxes totaling six or seven figures. He was also at odds with the inevitable avalanche of the sound era, which was coming as the (apparent) demise of all that he had worked…
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In the exurbs of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a cabdriver by the cheeky and affable name of Solo, a Senegalese immigrant, picks up a crestfallen old man who asks Solo to drive him to what is known as Blowing Rock, two hours away. Skeptical at first, but affable and bantering, Solo intuits this man might want to kill himself—he’s down in the dumps, visibly depressed, with sweaty tufts of thin white hair and deep, decades-old wrinkles…
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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 outmoded Bushido-way-of-life, so honorable to those with…
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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 Late Spring for a later date; the former is…
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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 seen no film like it,…
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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 innate and character-driven as they are products of his screenwriter’s…
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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 meantime, this prisoner whittles away at his…
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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 the ineluctable resignation of those that have to confront their fates. The films of Yasujirô Ozu…
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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 Ganguly (Gangapada Basu), are the final peals of a way…
