Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Julieta

    Julieta

    At the start of JULIETA, the folds of a red cloth expose a recognizable lushness. This is “Un film de Almodóvar.”  The cloth belongs, when the shot pulls back, to a dressing gown worn by Julieta, played by Emma Suárez, no less luminous now than she was in the Julio Medem films in which I…

  • Carol

    Carol

    Acting is the art of the inscrutability of the self. If, as Sartre would have it, the other person is unknowable, and, as Grotowski said, “no one can know the mind of the other person,” then it is the actor’s conundrum to know the mind of the person she plays and make him knowable to…

  • Antigone

    Antigone

    ANTIGONE is the most sedate of the productions I have seen directed by Ivo van Hove, but it might be the most deeply thought-provoking. There is little to be gained from it without thought. It hasn’t the sadism of his Hedda Gabler, the pain of his Cries and Whispers, the angst of his Scenes from…

  • The American • Up in the Air

    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…

  • 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…