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Our Last Tango
The Wim Wenders produced OUR LAST TANGO, by German Kral, reconciles art with life and narrative cinema with documentary. The lives are those of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, probably the longest enduring couple in Argentine tango as a performing art. I am careful how I put that, because there are social dance…
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Carol
Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…
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Victoria
It was to my surprise that at the commercial showing of VICTORIA I attended, Sebastian Schipper, the director, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, the cameraman-cinematographer, and Laia Costa, who plays Victoria, were on hand for a post-film discussion. It was a triple threat panel, a trio of virtuosity. What we had seen was the third take of…
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The Princess of France
There is a type of film that tells a story from Shakespeare, with or without his language, that happens in a time and place that might be called “a world without Shakespeare.” A plot unfolds that is recognizable as that of a Shakespeare play. But, a funny thing about the unfolding: in a milieu that…
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Ex Machina
EX MACHINA is a sci-fi thriller from Alex Garland on the theme of artificial intelligence. It raises the familiar questions – moral, ethical, ontological, political – with which the issue is fraught. Is a fully realized AI effectively human, or its equivalent; is it conscious (whatever that means) and morally aware; would it have a…
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Clouds of Sils Maria
In CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA the personal assistant played by Kristen Stewart holds the life together of the famous actor played by Juliette Binoche. It is admittedly surprising to realize, upon reflection, that Stewart herself, a good but still developing actor, also holds the film together, even though Binoche is, including in this film, among…
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Wild Tales
Damián Szifron’s movie WILD TALES opens with a prologue in which the laughs come at you like Roman slaves claiming to be Spartacus, one after another. It’s the first, and shortest, of six revenge comedies in a mordant Argentinian anthology that keeps one guessing at the violence to come while making sure we always know,…
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A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
There were times during A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT when it felt as though I were watching a movie for the first time in my life. It has been a long time since I have gone to anything so viscerally pure and original. It is a classic oddity: a North American release set…
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Palo Alto
In Gia Coppola’s movie about high school in Southern California, from a collection of stories by the actor James Franco (who plays a coach in the film), adolescent life does not seem that different from anywhere else in the United States. Or, leaving aside a few technological changes, than it did in my own time.…
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Young and Beautiful
You could sum up much of the French director François Ozon’s work as being about young people discovering sex and portraying it frankly. So it is not surprising if a capsule description of an Ozon film makes it sound titillating and exploitive. Swimming Pool, his most seen work in the U.S., told the story of…