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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...