Author: Philippe Vigneres

Build around a confession and set in a dated and rarefied world, “Phantom Thread” chronicles a love story drifting from the quiet domination of the male lover to the kinky passion the female lover vows to impose. The richly textured film slowly explores…

The narrative is a loose but carefully dated chronicle of a year in the life of Elizabeth, Empress of Austria and Hungary, from the end of 1877, marked by her 40th birthday, to the fall of 1878, as the Austrian-Hungarian Empire ruled by her husband Emperor Franz Josef is…

The doctor is confident: Elisabeth Vogler is in good health, physically and mentally. Nothing is wrong with her. Yet she is mute; she has lost the ability – or the willingness – to speak after experiencing a sudden and inexplicable shock onstage as she played Electra. For Elisabeth Vogler is a…

In 1770, Marianne, a female painter, that is a rather unusual case in the history of arts (though more and more women worked as painters in the course of the 18th century), is invited to spend a few days in a Brittany castle to make the portrait of the daughter of…

A young woman is embroidering a handkerchief in her room. Then, pleased with her work, she starts walking around the big, lavish house where she lives, at one point looking for a book she could like in a bookcase and at another moment touching briefly the keys of a piano. She…

In a way, this is the strictest courtroom drama possible: the plot is entirely developed within the courtroom and never physically strays away, relentlessly focusing on the place and the people involved. The crime and the characters are only presented through the proceedings but are never…

The establishing shot on the quiet, sunny, scenic section of the Seine river where folks are gaily rowing and the following string of short, carefully choreographed and composed shots showing these folks frolicking and enjoying the day in an open air café complete with a dance floor, are…

Arthur Schnitzler’s play was a study of the relations between men and women across various strata of the Austrian society at the end of the 19th century. It was made up of a collection of ten short dialogues, starting with a prostitute seducing a soldier, in a frank take on the popular…

In 1966 French director Robert Bresson shot one of his greatest films, and arguably one of the greatest (think of the views of Jean-Luc Godard), at least most radical, films in French cinema, “Au hasard Balthazar”. It relates the tragic life of a donkey, clearly striving to stick as close as possible…

Narayanaswami is a university professor, teaching philosophy in a Brahman colony in Chennai. He finds one day on the doorstep of his bungalow a young donkey – the new-born animal has just become an orphan after a bunch kids took on its mother, harassed it, and chased it around…

This Balthazar is not the famous Magus but a donkey. It first appears as a young animal, braying and suckling its mother. A couple of cheerful children, a boy and a girl, want to buy it even although the worried adult standing next to them claims it is impossible. The animal is…

The end titles state in their own way what has been obvious to the moviegoer: by dedicating the feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht director Brian De Palma acknowledges it is the remake of the 1932 gangster movie that so impressed the audience back then and stirred critics…

The narrative is a long flashback: the titles appear over strikingly grisly, less than sharp, slow-motion, black and white shots describing how a man gets shot on the platform of a railway station and is taking care by medics and wheeled at breakneck speed out to an ambulance. As people are agitating…

Titles as an exercise of calligraphy: one stroke is made, this is the character “yi”, a basic element of the Chinese language that could mean “one”; then just below comes another stroke, the same kind of line, the same character, so the film’s title seems to be “one, one”; but if…

The black and white cinematography smoothly wraps and highlights characters who have however barely the time to make a lasting impression, as the editing goes fast from one odd situation to another – yet faces can be wonderfully shot and mesmerize, the director more…