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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
There is much to be admired in Stephen Chbosky’s film of his novel THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, but what struck me the most was how terribly likable it was. Its very flavor – if it had one in the manner of the “rasas” of the ancient Sanskrit drama – would be enjoyability. Of…
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The Loneliest Planet
Among the new releases I have seen and liked so far this year, there is not a one that I admired as much as I did this one. THE LONELIEST PLANET is fresh and new, and at the same time solid and assured. It is a marriage of cinematic technique and psychological narrative so balanced…
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Nobody Walks
The vice and the virtue of NOBODY WALKS is its simplicity. A pretty young artist from New York has arranged for a Los Angeles sound editor to help her complete a gallery film project. His wife is the friend of a friend. The artist arrives on a jet plane and is immediately taken by the…
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Smashed
When I saw the trailer to SMASHED, something in Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s eyes told me I had to see it. I should normally have shied away from a film that appeared to be about alcoholism and its destructive effects, fearing the oversimplification and moralism with which our culture tends to address the issue, or a…
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Wake in Fright
In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…
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Liberal Arts
Josh Radnor – who acts in, directs and writes LIBERAL ARTS – plays an admissions officer in an unnamed urban university in New York City who revisits his alma mater, a liberals arts college in Ohio, also nameless, to deliver a tribute at the retirement dinner for a favorite professor. Before he leaves, we see…
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Little White Lies
I do not have a great deal to say about Guillaume Canet‘s two-and-a-half-hour LITTLE WHITE LIES. It was, undeniably, adroit. I was mildly impatient with it before it won me over through sheer psychological manipulation. This film about a group of vacationing friends, one of whose number has landed in the hospital with life threatening injuries…
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Wuthering Heights
One of the clearer processes of action and reaction in cultural history was that Romanticism reacted against Neo-Classicism, that Naturalism reacted in turn against Romanticism, and that, in a somewhat minor aftershock, Aestheticism recoiled from Naturalism. Amongst the many remarkable things about the new film of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is that it brings the…
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Cosmopolis
The 2003 novel by Don DeLillo (which I have not read) may have been a cautionary tale, but David Cronenberg’s film version of COSMOPOLIS is a dystopian fantasy of the present. The financialization of the world economy is complete. The captains of finance are threatened by mobs in Times Square and knife attacks on live…
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Beloved
In the early frames of BELOVED the ’60s Parisian shopgirl played by the resplendent Ludivine Sagnier lifts a pair of Dior pumps at closing time. She puts them on outside and thus begins her chance career as a streetwalker, through which she meets her Czech lover and the father of her child, whom decades later…