Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Personal Shopper

    Personal Shopper

    PERSONAL SHOPPER is a great film by Olivier Assayas and Kristen Stewart is great in it. It follows upon Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, also with Stewart, a great film too and parallel in structure. PERSONAL SHOPPER swaps out the fictional for the supernatural or implies, perhaps, that the two are one and the same.…

  • 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…

  • Wake in Fright

    Wake in Fright

    In his great essay On Racine, the French theorist Roland Barthes observed that the most ancient of tragedies arose in the arid and sundrenched landscapes of the Mediterranean, under merciless skies and aside great oceans. It would have been no accident that a sense of cosmic isolation and the exigencies of survival posed a dramatic…

  • Drive

    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…

  • Chloe

    Chloe

    I have not always liked Atom Egoyan, but, as he did in The Sweet Hereafter, he drew me in and held me with his new, and very substantial, thriller. Although CHLOE is a genre film, it is remarkably unpredictable, making conventions we know from Hitchcock and De Palma seem fresh and distinctive. Toronto in winter…