Posts

Wife Be Like a Rose The men whom Kurosawa was mourning were all filmmaking pioneers who worked throughout the transition from silent to sound film. While nearly all of Hollywood had embraced sound by 1930, in Japan the change lasted through 1936 and was a period of restless innovation. The Early Japanese Talkies series at the Museum of Modern Art is screening a diverse sampling of this pivotal period, spanning the major studios of Shochiku, Nikkatsu, and PCL (Photo Chemical Laboratory)....

Thirty-seven years on, Brian De Palma’s Carrie—an adaption of Stephen King’s breakout 1974 debut novel—has long been a bona fide classic, capable of inspiring its own Halloween costumes, sitcom references, cross-generational dialogues, and, now, studio remake. Looking at the film today—in this writer’s case, for the first time—it seems like a miracle it was ever made in the first place. Released in 1976, at a moment when major Hollywood studios were still improbably willing to give space to the personal visions of young directors, Carrie remains a wicked piece of work: a film deeply committed to making its fragile teenage heroine’s sufferings palpable, pitiable, and relatable—but only so that it can twist the knife in deeper when the time comes....

Someone once said that money can’t buy you love. But if Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new film is any guide, it might just buy you hate. In his second feature since his award-winning 2003 debut The Return, Zvyagintsev examines money’s role in a late-in-life marriage. Vladimir and Elena are a couple of sixtysomething Muscovites who have a caring if unequal relationship. He is a rich, retired businessman whose wealth affords them a certain lifestyle; she is a housewife and maid who married up....

When thrust under the crushing wheels of fate, sometimes you have to stake out a position on both sides of the law to save yourself and those you love. At least that’s how things are in writer-director John Sayles’s latest feature film Go for Sisters, a meandering tale of borderlands and underworlds. Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton) is a no-nonsense parole officer in Los Angeles. Her seemingly uptight devotion to the system begins to show cracks when she goes easy on ex-con Fontayne (Yolonda Ross), her best friend from back in the day, after an infraction....

At the beginning of Jamie Meltzer’s Informant, ex–militant anarchist Brandon Darby is instructed to look straight into the camera. He hesitates, clearly uncomfortable with being filmed, then quips: “It’s not looking straight at me.” His unease is understandable: Informant relates Darby’s shocking political about-face. After years as an avowed radical, Brandon shocked his activist peers by admitting to working with FBI agents to infiltrate and expose potential anti-government plots. Informant adeptly combines archival footage with current interviews to provide two contradictory portraits of one man....

Samuel Beckett had the enchanting voice of a natural actor—gentle, paternal, with a brogue that didn’t soften his incisive phrasing. Listening to Beckett’s verbal melody is one of the primary pleasures offered by Ross Lipman’s Notfilm, a lengthy documentary about the making of the playwright’s 1965 Film—a dour 22 minutes of existential panic. Two hours might seem to be overkill for an unsuccessful experimental short, but Notfilm is enthralling. Lipman shoots his documentary in black and white, and divides it into discrete segments—a section on Beckett, one on Buster Keaton (recruited after Beckett was loftily informed that Charlie Chaplin didn’t act in other people’s scripts, even if they had won the Nobel Prize), one on the production itself, and one on Alan Schneider, the film’s director....

Portnoy’s Complaint A good 30 years before American Pie’s Jim Levinson became intimate with a classic American dessert, Alexander Portnoy was having his way with a piece of raw liver in his mother’s bathroom in Newark. It was the 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint that launched Philip Roth, already a National Book Award winner for Goodbye, Columbus, into a maelstrom of literary celebrity and controversy, and began a career-long conflation between the author and his notoriously lust-ridden characters....

The Awakening is a ghost story thick with historical and literary antecedents. Brainy spinster and professional ghost-buster Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) makes her living debunking fake séances and charlatans in post–World War I England. It’s a very clever setup, as the million British lives lost in the war and subsequent influenza epidemic seemingly shattered the country’s sanity, and plunged it into a brief, embarrassing dalliance with Spiritualism. In one notable case, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became obsessed with séances and mediums in a desperate attempt to contact his dead son....

Benedict Cumberbatch cultists aside, theatergoers who saw Derek Jacobi play Alan Turing in 1986 in Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code may balk at seeing a Hollywoodized biopic that covers much the same ground. Except for one crucial sleight of script, The Imitation Game largely replicates the structure of Whitemore’s play. Both cover Turing’s budding as a math genius and his love of his doomed soulmate Christopher Morcom at Sherborne School, his cracking of Nazi Germany’s Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park during World War II, his complex relationship with a female fellow cryptanalyst, and the criminalization of him as an unashamed gay man that preceded his suicide in 1954....

You see a lot of Bashar al-Assad in The Light in Her Eyes, or at least portraits of him smiling, serene, throughout the busy sunny streets of a pre-uprising Damascus. But he is almost entirely—and quite refreshingly these days—irrelevant to Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix’s documentary, which was shot in 2010, months before the beginning of the revolt. The Light in Her Eyes, which recently premiered on PBS as part of the 25th anniversary season of the POV series (and will be streaming on the POV website until August 19), is centered on a more unusual and subdued heroine, Houda al-Habash....

With its plot centering on the casualties of divorce—namely, a seven-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of her parents’ custody battle—Henry James’ 1897 novel What Maisie Knew lends itself particularly well to the contemporary. Following in a long line of predominantly period-faithful Jamesian pictures, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s adaptation commendably preserves the book’s child perspective even if it doesn’t quite match the characteristically dark shades of the author’s moral fare....

A Confucian Confusion (Edward Yang, 2022) The difference in how Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang shoot Taipei can be easily (if crudely) summarized: Hou’s a country boy, and Yang’s a city slicker. For Hou, home lies in the mountains or by the rural seaside, and the city is a gleaming trap, where dreams are nurtured from afar but vanquished upon arrival. Though Yang expressed pangs of urban despair in his films, he was not so pessimistic about life in the capital....

A U.S. expat film scholar, curator, and lecturer who’s lived in Denmark since 1993, Jack Stevenson provides a definitive chronicle of that influential era in Scandinavian Blue. Thoroughly researched without being drily academic, and opinionatedly fun sans fanboy snark, this study of a brief, blonde moment in erotic cinema history doubles as Rorschach of two nations’ sexual (and censorious) morality. In which latter departments Sweden and Denmark were, despite minor differences, alike in being unencumbered by prudish attitudes toward the human body....

Citizen Saint (Tinatin Kajrishvili, 2023) During a press lunch at the 57th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, the regional governor discussed the Czech spa town’s prospects. Key to Karlovy Vary’s development, he explained, is a movement away from the mining industries that have shaped the local economy since at least the 16th century, and a prioritization of the culture industry. One of the oldest film festivals in the world, this year’s edition drew nearly 11,000 accredited visitors and sustained a vibrant, unrelenting party atmosphere over nine days....

Sébastien Betbeder’s light-footed sketch of a life (or two, or three) is divided into short, wryly titled chapters that count down from 40. This neat structuring device gives both a shape and an initial melancholy to the story about two friends from university, Arman (Vincent Macaigne) and Benjamin (Bastien Bouillon). Following various threads from the lives of his protagonists, Betbeder traces their romantic travails and grave life challenges with the intimacy and casual warmth of storytelling between friends....