Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Hermia & Helena

    Hermia & Helena

    HERMIA & HELENA opens in a New York that might, until the clues cohere, be Buenos Aires. Flowers that could be in any garden, fulgent with color. The echo of drumming on the avenues. A city park – where? The impression depends, to be sure, on a sense of both cities. The Argentine director Matías…

  • 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…

  • ma ma

    ma ma

    I am avoiding the obvious word to describe Penélope Cruz in MA MA, but so be it if by saying that she illumes the screen I call the cliché to mind. Magda is among her finest creations, a great screen performance. It is no surprise that Julio Medem, the most illuminative of contemporary directors, elicited…

  • The Princess of France

    The Princess of France

    There is a type of film that tells a story from Shakespeare, with or without his language, that happens in a time and place that might be called “a world without Shakespeare.” A plot unfolds that is recognizable as that of a Shakespeare play. But, a funny thing about the unfolding: in a milieu that…

  • Wild Tales

    Wild Tales

    Damián Szifron’s movie WILD TALES opens with a prologue in which the laughs come at you like Roman slaves claiming to be Spartacus, one after another. It’s the first, and shortest, of six revenge comedies in a mordant Argentinian anthology that keeps one guessing at the violence to come while making sure we always know,…

  • Una Noche

    Una Noche

    Lucy Mulloy’s UNA NOCHE is exquisitely edited. There are maybe two or three clichéd shots, which stand out precisely because the film as a whole is so fluent and sure handed in its visual rhythms. It is, broadly speaking, divided into two sections, both as a film and as a story: the second, which centers…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Todos tenemos un plan

    Todos tenemos un plan

    There is an implicit moral cynicism in the title of this engrossing film from Argentina, which in Spanish is called TODOS TENEMOS UN PLAN. We all have a plan, a game to play, a scam, perhaps, things we want and a way to get them. In this film, there are those who want love, money,…

  • Americano

    Americano

    AMERICANO is a thoughtful and richly acted film about an inheritance and the psychological issues raised by it. The main character is a French-American with two passports who flies from Paris to L.A. after his mother’s death and ends up in Tijuana looking for a woman, Lola, who may have inherited part of the estate.…