After watching Teorema, I get the feeling that one of the rivals of the image-focused cinema of Ingmar Bergman in the twentieth century was the renegade and iconoclastic Pier Paolo Pasolini, who with the image of a face, a body, a sudden movement, or a stony silence was often able…
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Frances Ha (2012)
Could it be that the mainspring of the behavior of our delightful twenty-something protagonist, Frances Ha, is a kind of innocuous solipsism? The walled-in world of her self-esteem, her occasional self-amusement suggesting that she’s getting along in the world despite its harshness and cruel indifference, her ability to dance down…
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Trouble in Paradise (1932)
As directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise raises an important question: if the entire milieu in which he finds himself is one steeped in suavity, refinement, the old-world elegance of the jet-setting crowd, what are the limits of a man’s suavity? Surely you can only become so refined and…
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On Sushi, or How to Live Dangerously
It was just over a decade ago that the young American actor Jeremy Piven had a run-in with mercury poisoning. It must have been a low blow. After getting roles in such touchstones of culture as Seinfeld and Entourage and establishing his renown as an actor of worth and substance…
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Murderous Schopenhauer
For a philosopher with a reputation that tends to be pooh-poohed as excessively gloomy and pessimistic, Schopenhauer and his posthumous popularity find no respite in one incident that occurred in the year 1821, when he was staying in his lodgings in Berlin. A young and brilliant man then in his…
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The Inland Sea (1991)
The luminous and streaky light rippling in the waters of the Inland Sea has the subtle power of a desert mirage. Pellucid like those of an atoll or a sea-green lagoon, these waters fill up an internal space connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Sea of Japan, also making possible…
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Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980)
I’m not sure that the wry and half-baked experimentation of Alain Resnais’ movie, Mon oncle d’Amérique, succeeds according to the lavish praise heaped on it by its receptive critics in 1980, the year of its release in France. It is an uneven movie that becomes more and more questionable as…
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Pixote (1980)
It can be interesting to think that the fortuity of your birth and the socio-economic circumstances foisted on you from the first are so decisive and for some so life-ending and catastrophic. Some people seem to strike gold out of the womb and enjoy the benefits of a lavish lifestyle,…
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The Woodmans (2010)
A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a…
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La Haine (1995)
It is in the bubbling turmoil of the burned-out banlieues of Paris that the feelings of its characters and of their apparent oppressors become clear. But La Haine distills these feelings into a curt and undeniable one-word message, played out during something less than twenty-four hours on the streets: hate.…
