Author: Philippe Vigneres

This story is born out of despair and chaos. Two long sequences of events, edited in a quick and jerky way, define the drama and introduce the lead characters, captured in stunning visual compositions. The first centers on the tragedy hitting the Kellers, who find out that a congestion…

The father, Fernando, is a beekeeper and a landowner, probably the wealthiest person in his poor, isolated village of the Castilian plain. The shelves of books in his studio, whose French windows have yellow-tainted panes set in honeycomb-like patterns, letting in the room a wonderful light…

It comes out, the faint light, slowly, delicately, on a right corner of the screen which has been from the start a solid black against which the thin white letters of the credits have appeared. Then it lingers, proving it has a shape: this is a window, closed, revealing a bed…

A group of fairground people arrive to entertain the French port of Rochefort on Friday; they would leave it on Monday; the constant comings and goings and the ups and downs of the bunch mixing pretty girls and nice-looking boys who are all smiles and fun frame and set the pace to a…

Can a musical made outside the United States go even a bit farther than what has already be produced as far as the dynamic of music within the film’s narration is concerned? At first glance, or rather hearing, it can. Spoken words do not prevail in the narration at all…

At the end of the 16th century, as Japan is still gripped by political infighting and chaos, the peasants of a small village must cope with a huge gang of bandits who regularly raid their village, pilfering their fields and houses. Stung by the outburst of one of them, Rikichi, who thinks it is high…

After an excruciating and exhausting shooting marred by incidents and a conflict with his main producer, Charles Pathé, forcing him to seek fresh funds in a Germany still viewed with distrust in his native France and a Russia turned communist in the wake of the 1917 revolution, director Abel Gance…

Her face is barely visible, bent over the prayer stool near the altar, wrapped in the white veil completing the gorgeous white dress, so distant in the stately long shot capturing the moment. Her voice, crucially, is also barely audible, her “No” getting lost in the distance while one of the nuns…

The crisp black and white cinematography slowly looks flawed as another color emerges, nestled in details, giving the pictures an eerie texture. It is the borders of a flag or a jacket that discreetly change but then the change becomes widespread and striking…

This is the scathing relation of a fall, relying on ironic and cruel repetitions and the heartbreaking contrast between miens and attitudes that could not have ever matched – love as a senseless thrill, turning awry. A detail proves to be not just…

She gives her name to the debut feature by Jacques Demy but she does not show up right away, quite the contrary. In fact the story of Lola starts with the wanderings of the three men loving her, three quite different fellows whose comings and goings across the native town of the director, Nantes…

Sets of dramatic images, often shot at bizarre, slanted angles in a broadly dark cinematography, blatantly messing with timelines and circumstances, are edited in rapid fire, stirring confusion and getting the audience lost, without clues and a clear narrative direction, even as they step into this…

Of course, there is the issue of what could happen to their daughter. The wife wants the girl to travel with her, the husband does not – that closes the case, as his approval is required. But the biggest issue is Nader’s father: he has the Alzheimer’s disease and his son looks after him in his apartment (his…

The film features the tropes of a road movie but if the white SUV rides endlessly dirty roads it remains in fact inside a small area, going on round circles, winding through the same hairpin bends, driving along the same quarries. The point is not to reach another destination or to explore a new land and…

It begins as a feminist statement. Realizing with embarrassment and surprise she has never fully owned her life, never had anything belonging to her, never carved out a place of her own, Lucy Muir, after a year spent, as demanded by tradition and property, mourning her beloved husband…