Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

    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…

  • The Artist and the Model

    The Artist and the Model

    Cinema is the art of the photographic image as it slips away, failing to establish itself, and is given over to the death of the present and the rebirth of the moment. The motion picture that is conscious of the beauty of its own image, and the desire to maintain it, as a photograph or…

  • Much Ado About Nothing

    Much Ado About Nothing

    Joss Whedon’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING is something to see, a smart, elegant, fast-moving romantic intrigue filled with the spirit and surprise of the best storytelling. It’s that rare film of a Shakespearean comedy that, without modernizing the language, is utterly comprehensible from the first frame to the last. Kenneth Branagh’s version of the play…

  • Frances Ha

    Frances Ha

    Perhaps the smartest thing about FRANCES HA, which was directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written with Greta Gerwig, is the importance it attaches to the characters in their down time. The film is basically about the young creatives – conventionally known as “hipsters” – who live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. The title character…

  • Blancanieves

    Blancanieves

    Black-and-white filmmaking can be ravishingly beautiful, and Pablo Berger’s BLANCANIEVES had me from start-to-finish by virtue of its images alone. The title is Spanish for “Snow White,” the story on which the film is based, but also evokes the silvery light out of which it is composed. It caught me in a kind of spell,…

  • Picasso Black and White

    Picasso Black and White

    The Guggenheim Museum was the perfect place for PICASSO BLACK AND WHITE. The creamy white spiral, and the muted grey light filtered through the great central skylight, seemed made for the display of the blacks, whites and greys of the artwork itself. I am glad to have gotten to the exhibit on its final day.…

  • Tabu

    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…

  • White Box Project

    White Box Project

    I went through the Black and White Gallery in Williamsburg (manifestly in its white phase) beyond the white curtains into the white and off-white cinderblock courtyard to watch, hear, feel and participate in the WHITE BOX PROJECT by Noémie Lafrance. In the white-walled patio a crowd collected, slowly, of performers and guests, distinguishable only by…

  • The White Ribbon

    The White Ribbon

    Michael Haneke‘s THE WHITE RIBBON is beautifully shot in black-and-white, ambiguous, enigmatic, sometimes a little awkward and even a bit stiff. Although the familiar Haneke mix of Hitchcockian suspense and Highsmithian amorality permeates every frame, the feel is of an historical fable. But, while gripping in the moment, it is strangely less memorable afterwards than…