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 creator, she finds...
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...
About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on...
It is said that great art often contains an element of contextual weirdness, a bit of the outré or taboo that contributes to a lasting impression that remains with us for years, even for a lifetime. If such an adage is true, then Léolo, a film directed by the meteoric filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...