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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
I have no doubt that, if compelled under pain of death and force of arms to watch Meryl Streep play Maggie – or, somewhat more willingly, to see Michelle Williams portray the pitch-perfect Marilyn – that I would still, if given a vote in the Oscar race, cast mine for Rooney Mara in THE GIRL…
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Drive
The restrained and atmospheric DRIVE, which stars both Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, was the perfect fix for my addiction to a certain type of offbeat thriller. There is familiar and seductive formula to it. Find an actual profession (in this case stunt driving) and transpose it to the world of criminal enterprise (in this…
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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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The Hermitage in the Prado
THE HERMITAGE IN THE PRADO was not an overwhelmingly memorable exhibit, but agreeable in scale and very interesting. I’m not big on gold artifacts, but looked at plenty of intricately crafted items, and some intriguing and architecturally precise paintings of the Hermitage itself. There’s a good modernist selection. I especially liked seeing a female “Absinthe…
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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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NYC Aerial Dance Festival
Anyone who would like to see an exuberant bungee cord homage to the music of Tom Waits, drunk on circus and carnival and cheap whiskey and wobbly barstools and splintered boardwalks, has one more chance tomorrow night at Manhattan Movement and Arts Center. The name of the piece is “A Window In” and it is…
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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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Camila Meza
Camila Meza has once again executed the rare feat of both singing the standards and playing the guitar, this time at the Cornelia Street Café’s downstairs cabaret, one of my favorite New York venues for food and music. When I first heard this Chilean artist sing in her native Spanish, I thought there was something…
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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…