Author: Philippe Vigneres

Men have their rituals. The moments and places of these rituals naturally carry them away from the constraints of work and family and drive them right at the heart of their passions; above all, they bring them together. It could be going to a friend’s bar, or hunting, or marrying. These friendly and manly…

A woman on her knees caringly, and perhaps with too much love, hugs her little boy of a son, who is still disturbingly haughty and mature for his age, shot in a slightly high angle. Then the camera lowers a little, pans a little to the left, and as the woman bends away, releasing her son, he is now…

Watching the watchers: the film begins with a long string of shots, often medium ones or closeups, on rapt faces, riveted by what they observe, which lies beyond the frame, out of the audience’s sight. The film eventually discloses what is transfixing the inhabitants of the small Iranian village where…

The last western shot by director Sam Peckinpah begins with a stunning and shocking cross-cut editing, blending a brownish cinematography capturing an old man and his companions discussing business matters before getting under fire from gunmen set to kill him, and succeeding in the grisly job shot…

This Wild Bunch (a phrase coined by newsmen to name famous groups of outlaws that shocked and awed folks across the American West) is a large and organized group of dangerous horsemen robbing banks and whatever stuff that can be sold for gold in Texas circa 1913. They are chased by a railroad…

The film has no title sequence and brings the audience in the heat of the action, a soccer match by night. It is shot in a wide shot from behind the goalposts and while a couple of players standing behind the net are chatting attention is inevitably caught by the tall, funny rabbit standing on the left, the…

The film begins and ends with the same, quirky cinematography: very grainy images, very slow motion, and extreme closeups, a sense of confusion even as the scene is centered on an element shot in a striking and obsessive manner, a gun at the start, the face of a young woman wandering…

In the first scene a man walks on a tightrope in a vast, featureless, and dark space. Unfortunately he loses his balance and falls – but he lands in a big safety net, no, he does not crash on the ground, well not yet. He sticks around this uncanny world, whose settings get more furnished but also…

Before enjoying the moving images, the audience first discover a film with a still image, the poster displayed in the movie theaters, the streets, and the media. The poster of this political thriller puts close to the center of the image in big red thin letters the names of Montand and Verneuil next to each…

Z, to be pronounced “zei”, means in ancient Greek “he (or she) is alive”. The alive and kicking man the film follows during the first part is a leading politician of a modern country very much like Greece who has traveled to a middle-sized town to speak to his local supporters. But finding a location…

Despite the stern, slightly sullen face, he comes across as a congenial fellow, someone who is well known and liked in this small town of Eastern Anatolia. He makes his way deliberately through the streets or across the court of the junior high school, unfazed by the deep layers of snow left…

This western goes to and lingers south of the border between the United States and Mexico and treads on political territory, alluding to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The lead character, El Chuncho, is a strong supporter of pro-revolution general Elias, under whose command he used to be a soldier…

The film bears the name of a famous rifle, the gun which supposedly won the West according to its maker, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, but it is not simply a nod to the arm’s quality and fame. A Winchester ’73 rifle is actually the central character of the film. Captured in…

This western movie brings the audience far away, beyond the Frontier in fact: it begins on a paddle steamer leaving Seattle to Alaska and most of the events unfold in the Canadian territory of Yukon. The landscapes may be as diverse and spectacular as they tend to be in the genre but here snow…

There is first the whiteness, an extensive and blinding whiteness, the whiteness of snow piled up high and spread everywhere. Shots, often of the medium and close kind, unflinchingly, harrowingly, show horses floundering in the depth of this snow, even collapsing, unable to move forward…