Author: Philippe Vigneres

Starting for many of the characters at 5:30 am, it should have been an ordinary day of work, though taking place in the rarefied world of military and political decision-making. It is true there are small but spectacular signs that all cannot be well in their lives. General Black barely recovers from a bad dream…

A stony and blunt United States Air Force Brigadier General commanding an air base supervising a group of bombers flying above the globe ready to launch an attack, including with atomic bombs single-handedly and with little interest in legality decides it is time to fight and destroy the Communist…

A blindfolded woman is led by a smiling man down a corridor, invited to push open a door, and then gets her sight back to marvel at the room both are now standing, the place where the baby the woman is expecting is to live under the care of the devoted and proud father. But the life of Justin Kemp, and…

This courtroom drama takes place where the public is not usually allowed to go: the room where the jurors gather after the closing arguments of the trial of a criminal case to reach a verdict. Twelve people, in this case all male and white, this is after all the 1950s United States, must…

So melodrama is a vision of the world which is a stark and forceful examination of a prejudiced society shaped by blunt social, racial, and gender delineations locking up the unlucky people targeted by the prejudice even as they yearn for respect and hope. Women are a privileged…

The title cards opening the feature define clearly the narrative’s purpose. It is going to be a morality tale catering to women in general but even more to the unlucky women, the vast majority of that other half of the mankind, who feel they cannot compete with glamorous, attractive but…

Words spoken – and not written, for once: from the very first seconds, “The Naked City” stands and claims to be a departure from the average feature, with credits told by a narrator who introduces himself as the film’s producer and duly explains how different the film purports to be. The…

Framing smartly the narrative’s first part, documentary-like pictures of the bustling streets and arteries of Mumbai shot by night capture how much the city is a crowd, teeming and tireless, a forbidding stream of faces and bodies apparently enjoying the city life but clearly in the harshest…

The first ever adaptation of the famous horror story written by Bram Stoker, has cast a long shadow on film history – “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Graunens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror”, shot in 1922 by director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, was immediately, and rightly, viewed as a milestone…

So the director of “One from the Heart” (1981), or perhaps of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), is at it again, telling in a grandiose way a grand romance struggling against time, trying to transcend time, overcoming in fact time. This is precisely because he can stop time, and she seems in the…

This is about desire and fulfillment. “Bonnie and Clyde” opens with a stunning, jerky, exciting string of shots on the face and body of Bonnie Parker as she fidgets in her bed and around it, from a close-up on her sensual lips to the medium shots on her nicely curvaceous, fully naked back, capturing…

An anchorman, Howard Beale, is told by the news division chief of his network, Max Schumacher, an old-time pal who has been put under pressure by a new, ruthless, ambitious general manager, Franck Hackett, that he would be fired in a couple of weeks because the ratings of his evening news bulletin are…

A simple job going out of control: a trio of rather ordinary and diffident guys try to rob a bank in Brooklyn. Just pointing a gun to a hostage frightens the younger who readily walks away, apologizing for his lack of composure. The two others, on the face of it far more determined but actually as…

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…