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…

  • Sleep No More

    Sleep No More

    I was one of those lining up on Memorial Day night to see Punchdrunk’s SLEEP NO MORE in the Chelsea gallery district. The Scottish play as nightmare is an old trope, well founded in the text. So to deconstruct it as a sort of haunted house theme park and fragment its episodes in the manner…

  • 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…