Author: Philippe Vigneres

The young bride is incensed: the groom has let her down, just by getting so drunk that he cannot walk, and certainly not taking her in his arms for their first night. The camera pans and moves: the incident occurs in a wider gloomy and mucky world, a Gypsy settlement somewhere in Yugoslavia…

From the beginning to the end the voice-over is rarely quiet. The narrative is painstakingly told by Michael O’Hara, the lead character, who is eager to depict the context, ponders on his feelings, and finds at the right time the right explanations to the grim facts that have threatened…

In 1959, in house in Taipei, a man is intently listening to a radio program reporting on the results of national exams teenagers have passed to enter the university, the speaker reeling off the names of the successful students. Clearly something is wrong and the rest of this prologue shows the man…

From the summer of 1913 to the summer of 1914, a few but nasty, spectacular incidents mar the life of a quiet village in northern Germany. First the doctor is badly hurt when his horse trips over a wire stretched between trees leading to his garden. Then the wife of a peasant gets killed…

A man talks excitedly to a small group of silent fellows as well-dressed, serious, distinguished the fiery speaker, pacing up and down frantically a small spot of a huge waste ground. Then in the crowded, huge hall of a modern building official-like men stand gathered around a vast model of building to be…

Up and down, narrow and wide: the film’s first part features gorgeous long shots on mountains overlooking the rocky place where a lonely man toils to dig gold, a struggle with the flinty, stony nature that visually swings from dark close shots deep down the well he has dug to sun-scorched…

Here is a tale of an ambition going wrong: yearning for a Pulitzer Prize, Johnny Barrett, staff reporter in a daily newspaper, reckons he has discovered a breathtaking case of great investigative journalism: solving a homicide case that took place in a mental hospital by getting locked in…

The curlicues of the titles and the nice songs hint at a romantic film. The oddball and outrageous behaviors of the characters, their absurd lines, the situations they box themselves in soon reveal the film plays in the comedy category. And the final shots are the epitome of the relaxed…

In his previous films, alcohol was poured liberally, to say the least, a kind of fuel sustaining the antics, the wanderings, the despair too of his characters, whether they were the young Black and White artists of “Shadows” (1958) struggling to get satisfaction, the lovers of “Faces” (1968) craving so…

She stands on the left of the shot composition, looking for her way in the New Orleans streets, her worried face turned to the left, unaware of a mirror next to her, on the right part of the image, reflecting her clearly.

Repeating the same, spectacular composition shot emphasizes the sentimental achievement of the heroine, a dream coming true, the simple fact she is now the chosen. The camera is set on the landing of the last floor of the Vienna posh residential building where most of the film’s scenes take place…

The camera’s eye is turned upwards, shooting ceilings, vaults and medallions; then it is lowered and moves along remarkably long corridors and huge rooms or halls, still capturing this exuberant style of architecture and ornaments evoking the German Baroque. Sentences depicting the narrator’s…

The first scene shows two women talking about furniture; one, standing with a coat on, is a customer spelling out her wishes while the other, half sitting on a piece of furniture, listens carefully while smoking a cigarette. It should have been a mundane scene in any…

Year 1968 may be related for many to cobblestones thrown into the air and tear gas sweeping the streets, a great, hectic, unforgettable moment in counter-culture in the world and among the youth, with revolution in the air, and revolutionary ideas…

Director Pedro Almodóvar has rarely overlooked what was going on in the Spain where he has been churning out shorts and features since the mid-1970s. His stories showed a man aware of social changes, yet not really interested in a more political take on the nation. Then the enfant terrible born…