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…
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The Charmer (2017)
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…
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Election (1999)
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…
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While We’re Young (2014)
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…
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The Only Son (1936)
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…
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The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
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…
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Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
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…
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Un Coeur en Hiver (1992)
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…
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We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
“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…
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A Sunday in the Country (1984)
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…
