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Inception
Christopher Nolan‘s INCEPTION. The themes are familiar. Think Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, even Calderón, Cervantes, Shakespeare. Dreams within dreams, life as a dream, the universe dreamed by the maker. The filmmaking is deft, the timing exquisite, the rhythms gripping. Yes, there are the expected twists (or not) and the predictable ending…
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I Am Love • Everyone Else
I AM LOVE grows on you. In some respects it tells a straightforward story of love, family and infidelity. In others, it is oblique and enigmatic, like the Resnais and Antonioni films of the ’60s in that there seems always to be something vital but unspoken beyond the explicit plot, forever implicit, never stated or…
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Anton Chekhov’s The Duel
ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE DUEL captures much of the strange poetry of diffidence and indirection that makes Chekhov a great dramatist and his comic dramas so difficult to perform. Indeed, one of the film’s achievements is to reveal the extent to which the author’s prose fiction, upon which it is based, possesses so many of the…
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Ondine
The trailer for ONDINE does not even try to capture the delicacy of Neil Jordan‘s new film, which is more lyrical and poetic than suspenseful and melodramatic. Myths and fairy tales are not so much accounts of fancifully impossible events as patterns of experience that provide insight into the quotidian by seeming to defy the…
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Love Ranch
At its best, LOVE RANCH feels like some forgotten classic of ’70s Americana, an abandoned stepchild of Peter Bogdonavich or Bob Rafelson, with a dash of Roger Corman thrown in. There is a kind of nostalgic pleasure to be had in the affection it evinces for the kitsch and vulgarity that was at one time…
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Room in Rome
Exactly why I found ROOM IN ROME to be so beautiful is not easy to explain, but it goes well beyond the prurient interest, which, once one is watching the film itself (when the actresses are draped by many more towels and bathrobes than implied by the publicity), gives way to the enchantment of the…
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The City of Your Final Destination
THE CITY OF YOUR FINAL DESTINATION is the first Merchant Ivory film to be released without the involvement of the late Ismail Merchant. Cinephiles have not always favored the determinedly literary and so, the argument goes, un-cinematic Merchant-Ivory franchise (James Ivory being its other half), but I have usually found the bookish pace engrossing and…
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Chloe
I have not always liked Atom Egoyan, but, as he did in The Sweet Hereafter, he drew me in and held me with his new, and very substantial, thriller. Although CHLOE is a genre film, it is remarkably unpredictable, making conventions we know from Hitchcock and De Palma seem fresh and distinctive. Toronto in winter…
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An Education
Of the much admired British film AN EDUCATION I am become one of the admirers. Carey Mulligan is a charismatic new talent (winsome, witty, smart), and the movie, directed by Lone Scherfig with a script by Nick Hornby, really has something to say about education and of what it ought to consist. In tandem with her formal…
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The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke‘s THE WHITE RIBBON is beautifully shot in black-and-white, ambiguous, enigmatic, sometimes a little awkward and even a bit stiff. Although the familiar Haneke mix of Hitchcockian suspense and Highsmithian amorality permeates every frame, the feel is of an historical fable. But, while gripping in the moment, it is strangely less memorable afterwards than…