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The Things of Life
I was attracted to the THE THINGS OF LIFE, the Claude Sautet series at The Film Society of Lincoln Center, as he is one of those directors whose work I do not know well but which is of evident quality and importance. A contemporary of Nouvelle Vague figures like Godard, Rohmer, Varda and Truffaut, he…
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Ruby Sparks
RUBY SPARKS is sensitive at every turn, and captures a sort of emotional truth about the nature of identity and even its link to existence itself. Ruby Sparks is a young woman with certain traits, qualities and a rough biography who is invented by an author struggling to equal the success of his bestselling first…
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Take This Waltz
I was a little hesitant about going to this one, even though I like and respect both the actress Michelle Williams and Sarah Polley, the writer/director. That’s because TAKE THIS WALTZ seems on the surface to be another indie movie of an all too familiar type, an earnest little drama about twenty and thirty somethings…
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Trishna
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…
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Savages
On the day I saw SAVAGES, I heard two critics on NPR call it one of the worst movies ever made and read a review in the New York Times that made it sound as if it were touched by poetry. Then I discovered on the app I use to check for show times that…
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Unforgivable
André Téchiné‘s new film is a subtle and sophisticated work that has the feel of a complex and intricate thriller but without the expected sensational climaxes and revelations. The solutions to the mysteries that arise are more like answers to the questions of life, and sometimes, of course, there are no answers, or at least…
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Americano
AMERICANO is a thoughtful and richly acted film about an inheritance and the psychological issues raised by it. The main character is a French-American with two passports who flies from Paris to L.A. after his mother’s death and ends up in Tijuana looking for a woman, Lola, who may have inherited part of the estate.…
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To Rome with Love
Woody Allen’s cinematic tour of Europe, having taken us to London, Barcelona and Paris, now sets down in Rome. There’s an obvious Fellini tribute in how the movie is framed, à la Roma, with a Roman traffic cop (a thankless job if ever there was one) delivering opening and closing paeans to the city. But the…
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Peace, Love & Misunderstanding
I enjoyed the Hudson Valley and Catskills settings of PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING, where I used to spend a lot of time, and which have a picturesque charm. They also seem a little frozen in time, even as they have become more crowded, with the ’60s living on in the iconography of Woodstock and a…
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Spaghetti Western Festival
A Spaghetti Western Festival at Film Forum? I am SO in. I started with THE BIG GUNDOWN, which I had never seen, and that contains the memorable line: “In America being quick on the draw is more important than precise shooting,” and am looking forward to hour after hour of sweaty gunmen, ambiguous heroes, some…