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 medieval French literature to theoretical physics and Eastern mysticism,…
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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 even in this getup, and giggling because it is quite…
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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 a fly finds its way, the lonely life of a prison…
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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 Esmail’s job, and to have as the first scene a panting enigmatic…
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Its star a decidedly pudgier character than that of his bravura bad-boy role as a high-school truant, Election finds in Matthew Broderick the perfect hypocrite. And yet every main character in the film exhibits this same hypocrisy, just to different degrees. And so he’s far from alone—he just happens to be helming the ship. Election can sometimes be entertaining, even if this entertaining is that of an over-the-top satire in which repeated excess is the…
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Opening with a pertinent but in-plain-sight quote from The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, in whose play a character forbiddingly refers to the dread of letting in the so-called young people, While We’re Young tries to bring to its thematic elements a coherence and a sense of character that should be the preserve of a more textured and multifarious film. This is still the case—While We’re Young tarnishes its lighthearted comedy by pointing up its…
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In a succession of shots inside a silk factory showing the long piston-like production lines and the bits and pieces of a mechanical world, the parameters of O-Tsune’s own world become apparent: it is that of an endless toiling so that her son, the young and prepubescent Ryosuke, can finish up his elementary education and they can both live unperturbed in their scrimping and meager existence in the small, homey, rural town of Shinsü. But…
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As a man of surrealist extraction working on it with another notable surrealist of the time, Luis Buñuel—who was to go on to complete his fantastic corpus starting with that one pristine surrealist sally, Un Chien Andalou—Jean Epstein directed and produced The Fall of the House of Usher with the result that, bringing alive the eerie gothic ambience of Poe’s short story, he committed to film a visual tour de force: a funhouse of style…
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With sumptuous colors and a settled, contemplative aesthetic of long shots and static shots interspersed with some notable close-ups, Raise the Red Lantern has the flair and attentiveness of a great film. But it’s not as successful as if it were evaluated by its visual pleasures alone—missing is the subtle development of character and a resolution that makes sense of the closed-world oppression of this Chinese estate, where the main character, Songlian, has to live…
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Two men working in a business for violin restoration play squash together and dine together at a local bistro, but they otherwise keep to themselves—at least the voiceover, heard once in the beginning of the story, would have us believe that this is the case. Uttered by the laconic and emotionless Stéphane, this voiceover reveals more than anything else in the story the attitudes and the personality of this vaguely ascetic man. A master craftsman…
