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The Future
I missed this in New York and was intrigued but somewhat doubtful as to how I would feel about it. So I was glad to have the chance to see it in Madrid with the added interest of Spanish subtitles. I need not have worried. Miranda July’s THE FUTURE is eccentrically lovely, a small act…
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A Dangerous Method
A DANGEROUS METHOD is the film version of a play version of a book about the schism between Freud and Jung and the role played in it by a young woman who was Jung’s patient, student and lover. It is also, as such, a pleasant surprise. On one level, the lines seem stage-bound and almost…
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Sleeping Beauty
I should say that this is not wholesome holiday fare. Julia Leigh‘s SLEEPING BEAUTY is a sort of Australian feminist manifestation of a genre that I associate with French directors such as Catherine Breillat (who has directed a film of the same title) and Jean-Claude Brisseau, which dissects non-normative or perverse sexual behavior in a…
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Anonymous
What if anything to say about ANONYMOUS? I can say that I enjoyed it well enough without thinking it great. That although a legitimate argument can be made for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays that are called Shakespeare’s, the film does not make anything like one…
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Cries and Whispers
If there is a single work that drew me to European art film as an undergraduate it was Ingmar Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS. With its ticking clocks, raw yet controlled acting, and dark psychology (including an act of self-mutilation the shock value of which has only recently been equaled by von Trier’s Antichrist) it was…
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Blackthorn
The myth of the American West, is, in Mateo Gil‘s BLACKTHORN, with an ingenious screenplay by Miguel Barros, still rugged and romanticized in its values, has neither loosened its grip on the imagination nor escaped the fog of nostalgia. One wonders what input Sam Shepard, in the leading role but also a master playwright on…
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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…
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Age of Consent • The Tempest
I came to Norman Lindsay’s witty, wise and wily novel AGE OF CONSENT through the effervescent film of the same name that the great Michael Powell directed in 1969. Some have spotted a connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the plot, which concerns a painter struggling to find inspiration on an isolated Australian isle accompanied…
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Mesrine
MESRINE Parts 1 & 2 is a strangely compelling cinematic event, which seems the word to describe anything in the theater that requires a double commitment. I saw the parts on subsequent days but had the timing been different would have happily taken an intermission or lunch break on a single day. The anti-hero was…
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The American • Up in the Air
Seeing THE AMERICAN made me read the book on which it is based. Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman turned out to be a passable thriller that has its moments but pales in comparison to the film. The movie is a taut, perfectly paced and morally ambiguous character study that, by making the central figure…