At a surface level, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939) looks quite a bit like one of those comedies of manners that western art has been pumping out without interruption over the past five hundred years. Take a group of aristocrats, have them declare their Read More …
Orson Welles famously claimed that his 1962 film, The Trial, an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s seminal novel, was the greatest film he had ever made. Whether or not this is true is certainly up for debate given the richness of Welles’ cinematic oeuvre, but The Trial is, in many Read More …
The fifth feature film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul is superficially a retelling of the moment that the director’s parents met at an occupational psychology interview in a Thai country hospital. This description, however, misrepresents Syndromes’ visually refreshing meditative exploration of first encounters, memories, and place. Syndromes’ meandering Read More …
If Born into Brothels merely recorded the marginal lives of the beautiful, all but doomed children of a Calcutta brothel, it would probably be nearly unbearable, though potentially still worthwhile. But photojournalist Zana Briski, a Cambridge religion student who moved into the Sonagachi red-light district with the Read More …
In 1959, near the end of his career, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu returned to a story he had directed twenty-five years earlier, remaking his silent-film classic A Story of Floating Weeds as Floating Weeds. (A Story of Floating Weeds: 1934, silent, black-and white; Floating Weeds, 1959, sound, color.) Keeping Read More …
Anyone impressed by the complex, multi-layered narrative in Christopher Nolan’s multi-layered Inception should see Paprika, which came out in 2006. In Satoshi Kon’s animated science-fiction epic, we follow a Japanese research psychotherapist named Dr. Atsuko Chiba who, by night, adventures into her patients dreams using a high-tech innovation Read More …
Terrence Malick’s 1978 story of adultery on the Texas Panhandle is set just before World War 1, but it resounds with echoes of Old Testament drama. Blast-furnace worker Bill (Richard Gere) gets in a fight with his foreman, then goes on the run with his Read More …
This 2006 Russian film, available on DVD from Film Movement, takes us to a monastery on the edge of the White Sea. There, the monks are troubled by the antics of one of their own—a prankster who speaks in riddles and tends to a fiery Read More …
Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre accomplish a remarkable feat in M (1931). They humanize child murderer Hans Beckert. Suspenseful, drenched in tragedy, M brings the audience through Beckert’s harrowing final days as he evades both police and the criminal underground. Beckert’s frantic efforts to escape the tightening noose echo Read More …
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s celebrated feature-length debut is a story about two brothers who must decide whether to trust the stranger who suddenly arrives in their home claiming to be their father. As the sons argue about how to respond, they follow this stranger out on what Read More …