• Pericles

    Pericles

    No play in Shakespeare is more impelled by the power of story than PERICLES. It could be a tale improvised on the spot, out of bits of myth and wrinkles of fate, a complication here, a resolution there. Its domain is the Mediterranean, which means, in the age of Shakespeare, a tale of all the…

  • Doruntine

    Doruntine

    A lot of theater happens because its creators have something to say. But New York’s Blessed Unrest has something to tell. To see them is an act of devotion to the significance of storytelling, psychological, aesthetic, and ideological, and the pleasure to be had from it. They enact not just the allure of the tale…

  • Karina Beorlegui

    Karina Beorlegui

    When Karina Beorlegui alternates between tango and fado, she discerns a unity deeper than the obvious affinities and plays with something more than complementarity or contrast. Going from one to the other feels more like rounding a bend in the lane than switching to a parallel road. She gives voice to the shared historical drama…

  • Blancanieves

    Blancanieves

    Black-and-white filmmaking can be ravishingly beautiful, and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES had me from start-to-finish by virtue of its images alone. The title is Spanish for “Snow White,” the story on which the film is based, but also evokes the silvery light out of which it is composed. It caught me in a kind of spell,…

  • Por el agua de Granada

    Por el agua de Granada

    Last week at Terraza 7 Train Cafe I saw POR EL AGUA DE GRANADA … CANCIONERO LORQUIANO, a collaboration of the Spanish singer Lara Bello and the guitarist Eric Kurimski to present renderings of Federico García Lorca’s poems and lyrics. As it happens, Bello is the very first person I would turn to for such…

  • To Rome with Love

    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…

  • Mysteries of Lisbon • Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl

    Mysteries of Lisbon • Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl

    MYSTERIES OF LISBON, four hours and an intermission from Raúl Ruiz, is in the best Iberian-Mediterranean tradition of tales within tales within tales (think Don Quijote  or The 1001 Nights), each revealing that reality is a little different than was known before. There are beauties to be had here, and moments of wit, and a…

  • Inception

    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…

  • Ondine

    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…

  • Room in Rome

    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…