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 enterprise in an era dominated by both the internet and...
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 make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things and yesses and noes and...
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 mythical creature. That long-drawn-out approach at dawn is so superb, so dreamlike, so perfect a...
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 inevitably speak the language of the New World. And yet even without this tidbit that...
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 say hello, to reminisce, and maybe to get something out of this long-forgotten friendship...
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 at the Beach revolves like a frozen planet, setting its face to this and...
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 not that he was so variously brilliant in so many fields and with tastes ranging from...
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 Up Baby is undoubtedly one. There is awe because Cary Grant stays in unflagging character...
Hunger is about the brutality of sectarian violence, competing interests, bloodshed, and war. It chooses no sides, but instead puts at the center of its characterization a limpid sensitivity to the human individual, be he an Irish Republican or a devout Ulster Loyalist. The film is shot through with glittering images of the solitude and the sensitivity of a prisoner in whose sun-deprived fingers...
About a young Iranian man in Denmark looking for a wifely stand-in to solidify his residency, The Charmer is itself a charming film that chooses to reveal all the complexities of this man’s circumstances slowly, shrewdly, one facet at a time. This method of refusing to disclose the full extent of the main character’s circumstances—as for instance its choosing to withhold information about...