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Side Effects
I can’t imagine a subtler thriller than Steven Soderbergh’s SIDE EFFECTS, if, that is, it is a thriller at all. For one is never quite sure, until the whole thing is over, just what sort of movie it is – if then. It begins ominously, the camera moving in on a window behind which something…
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Amour
The critic Stanley Kauffmann once listed what he saw as the key differences between theatre and film. His most interesting and yet least developed point was that what he calls “the effects of death” are at their most powerful on film. He meant that, since the screen actor’s work, in all of its lifelike detail,…
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Anna Karenina
I saw Joe Wright’s ANNA KARENINA a while ago and didn’t know what to think about it. This is not to say that I did not have feelings, thoughts, and sensations while watching it, that some of those were positive and some not, nor that I was not glad to have seen it (I was)…
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On the Road
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a literary rush when I read it sometime in the 1980s, the perfect expression of a sort of counter-mythology to the mainstream myth of the American Dream. The Dream myth holds that we can do anything we want in this country, choose our professions, attain wealth, and build families,…
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Tabu
I admit to a certain disappointment in the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s TABU, widely praised as a neo-surrealist masterpiece, and indeed with a number of engrossing qualities. It is visually striking, as though put together from black-and-white home movies and other found footage, although nothing is rough-around-the-edges in its austere and polished imagery. There is…
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A Royal Affair
I took great pleasure in A ROYAL AFFAIR. For one thing, it acquainted me for the first time with an historical event of considerable drama and importance, involving a struggle for the throne of Denmark that was a sort of proxy for the conflict between reaction and the Enlightenment that would lead just a few…
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Price Check
If I had to have a newly appointed Boss from Hell in a regional office of market research for a chain grocery corporation who starts off her tenure with a symbolic firing, makes the company Halloween party costume mandatory, comes to said masquerade dressed as Pocahontas (or someone), sexually harasses the male staff, and plays…
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Skyfall
Now that Moore, Roger Moore has declared that Craig, Daniel Craig has overtaken Connery, Sean Connery as the best Bond ever, it may be time to reflect upon the whole Bond enterprise and why it has endured for half-a-century. The evolution of Bond as a cultural icon calls attention to how its progress has paralleled…
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Holy Motors
In HOLY MOTORS Denis Lavant plays Oscar, a gnarly and dissipated man who is driven around Paris in a limousine to keep “appointments” for which he dons costume and makeup and performs violent or otherwise transgressive acts. It is a sort of invisible theater for clueless onlookers the purpose of which is, at least initially,…
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Café de Flore
Antoine is happy, the narrator of CAFÉ DE FLORE informs us, in the presence of the blond mistress for whom he has left his wife as a result of a shared glance at a Quebec nightclub It was an instantaneous connection, not unlike that which he and his wife experienced in childhood, or, oddly enough,…