Author: Philippe Vigneres

This is the evening: Gu Sheng-tsai comes to the huge, dilapidated house adjoining the house where he lives with his mother, at the time set by the mysterious, nice-looking but stern young woman who has chosen to live in there. He gingerly walks through the sprawling place, guided…

The film opens with a wide shot capturing an impressive parade of warriors and officials streaming from the long wall of a palace, which makes up a thin line marking the horizon in the background. The people are arrayed in a couple of parallel, long, neat lines; between the lines moves…

The plot is based on the momentous technical and artistic change in the film world brought on by the advent of the synchronized sound and voice recording in 1927 with the release of “The Jazz Singer”. Overnight the possibilities available to filmmakers were expanded and…

Rick Dalton has long been viewed as a great and bankable television star, thanks to his lead role in a popular western series, playing a self-confident and ruthless bounty hunter. But now his career is floundering and he realizes his success could be something of the past. Nevertheless…

A young American, Kansas, who has settled down in a village in a lush corner of Peru gets hired as a horse wrangler in a movie set built nearby for a low-cost western production. The experience leaves him dissatisfied and instead of dreaming about filmmaking, he resumes a life that seems…

This is nighttime and the weather is rainy. A distant figure is shot stepping stealthily, hurriedly, into a movie theater. And so begins a strange journey.
Entering a movie theater means anyway exploring a new world, designed by a crew, enlivened…

Cinema is a gift of life, given out of love.
It was not eagerly sought after: the first scene shows a boy stridently reluctant to go to the movies, with his parents trying their best to convince him he should give it a try. Subtly, their…

The film was shot soon after Robert Wiene shot “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” but there has been no trace of any public release of that other egregious example of Expressionism in Germany and for a long time copies were hard to get. That is…

As she lies dying a young Salvation Army worker asks to meet a man she tried to help. Two of her colleagues scour the city right away, but quite unenthusiastic: David Holm seems to have been a hell of a problem, even a nuisance – as she wakes her daughter, Edit’s mother has begged…

Still images lie at the core of the moving picture – at least according to a title card shown at the beginning: it is the very existence of old photographs of the landscape and folks of the South-West of Iceland that prompted director Hylnur Pálmason to imagine what has been the…

This is not the first time a film examines the life and works of great 17th century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn – think of Alexander Korda in 1936 (“Rembrandt”) or Jos Stelling in 1977 (“Rembrandt fecit 1669”). What sets right away director Peter Greenaway’s effort apart…

An old man slowly ascents stairs and awkwardly manages to sit in an armchair. Gazing over the room, he thinks about his life. A fast-paced series of images suffices to narrate his early years, under the watch of an old woman and over the backdrop of windmills (the…

Alexander Korda does not shoot a comprehensive biography of Rembrandt Harmeenszoon van Rijn; he just studies his character over three key periods of his life. The film thus starts with the tragic year 1642, when the painter’s beloved wife, Saskia, dies, and his huge work “The…

With the titles cleverly interspersed between the shots, introducing characters and actors, a collection of close-ups first uncomfortably draw attention to the make-ups, wigs, and grimaces of some aristocrats of the 17th century England and to the ravenous appetite for…

The movie narrates the life of Dutch-born painter Vincent Van Gogh from 1879, when he is minister in the mining towns of the South of Belgium, to his death in 1890, aged 37, near Paris. Thus, it spans his entire artistic career, from his drawings of the Borinage working…