“Whatever is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.” –Friedrich Nietzsche Adapted from the eponymous 2003 novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin is as stylized and artful as it is inadequate and muddled. The compelling story of the book, about a mother’s experiences with her serial-killer-to-be psychopathic son, undergoes in the film a diffusing of its chronology through the mother’s wounded and burdensome memory. This takes on a tour of…
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How well do the members of a family really know one another? A Sunday in the Country seeks to dredge up from a distant, indistinct, but halcyon past the feelings and memories of one family convening for a day outside Paris toward the end of the summer of 1912, with the far-off rumble of thunder as the uncertainty of the First World War billows like a menace. It is a quiet film that is all…
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“What does marble think when it’s being sculpted? It thinks, ‘I am struck, insulted, ruined, lost.’ Life is sculpting me. Let it finish its work.” The ancient myth of the spouses Orpheus and Eurydice has a time-honored and immemorial place in the arts, in literature, and during the twentieth century in the cinema, where Jean Cocteau put to use his pullulating and vibrantly artistic mind to make Orpheus, one of his greatest films. This is…
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As a finely stylized Japanese film of the Jidaigeki genre, a period piece like so many of its samurai brethren, The Ballad of Narayama stands out nonetheless as an early amalgam of the theater and the cinema. It is an artful filming of the eponymous novella by the Japanese writer Shichirô Fukazawa, itself adapted from the Japanese legend of the practice of what is called obasute, the ritual killing of the elderly, whose offspring take…
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Summer with Monika begins with the bustle of the city of Stockholm, where the inlets of the Baltic Sea split up its landmasses into a vast and thriving archipelago. The establishing shots and the exterior cutaways in this film are superb, lending to the atmosphere the lucid and palpable vibrancy of a city already on its way toward international stature, and they inform every aspect of the story itself and its characters. Stockholm has rarely…
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In a working-class South Yorkshire community whose bread-and-butter economy is coal mining, a boy named Billy goes about his life as a hopeless student, brother, and son, runty and undernourished, neglected and bullied, condemned to a future in the pits like his resentful and abusive brother. As if it were a historical documentary dug up to reveal the cold and lifeless social repercussions of a stale working class, the film, its bleakness and the stark…
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Setting the cinematic standard for an adaptation of a play by William Shakespeare, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet received accolades aplenty when it was released in the fall of 1968. It seemed to have the hallmarks of a faithful literary adaptation from the beloved Bard, and its setting in modern Italy, using location shooting as a further stamp of authenticity, was to become the backdrop of the many sumptuous and sensuous scenes that brought Shakespeare…
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On a quiet, snowy winter evening in the city of Dublin, just after the turn of the century, a horse-drawn carriage bearing revelers for the feast day of Epiphany clatters up to a modest, homey townhouse whose upper floors have already begun stirring in the darkness, like a beacon of storms. Lighted lamps stand outside, burning steadily and dotting the long snow-blanketed sidewalks; the high window-lights release into the flurries of the streets a quaint,…
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In the cinematic hub of Austin, Texas, home to a reputable university, shortly after the turn-of-the-century and the disaster of September 11th, Waking Life plays out its enthralling rotoscope dreamland with what seems like a disordered, chaotic flurry of dialogues. It is all very unremitting—loquacious, academic fuzziness, street-talk and bone-dry theory rattled off as though it were the effluvia of something in the air, a vapor or an intoxicant, a poison maybe. While most narrative…
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A grizzled, weather-beaten retiree and once a police detective in a hinterland of Nevada, Jerry Black is on the cusp of life-changing events. On the night of his surprise retirement party, his replacement (played by Aaron Eckhart with a clean-shaven, big-chinned impudence) leaves the party on a call—a girl, found in a snowy woodland earlier that day, has been raped and murdered. Unable to resist, Jerry asks to go along, hoping to get in a…
