The film credits appear during a long, elaborate, sequence shot both in black and white and in colors showing a young woman talking to a fortune teller. The soothsayer tries to make sense of the tarot cards while her client starts panicking. It turns out the pretty young woman’s…
Category: Review
Sans toit ni loi
A farm worker finds in a ditch the frozen corpse of a young woman seemingly in her 20s early in the morning of a winter day in the French department of Gard, which lies along the Mediterranean sea. Members of the local gendarmerie briefly examine the place and interrogate a few persons before…
Atash-e sabz – The Green Fire
As the camera glides over a stately white facade featuring sculptures while the film’s titles roll, the voices the soundtrack plays relate a bizarre trial, with a woman pleading a judge to punish her husband after he broke a mirror, bringing bad luck to their home and life, while the husband blames her for the…
West Side Story (2021)
A world of ruins: the smooth aerial shot surveys endless rows of half-demolished buildings; then the camera swoops down to sway around a towering wrecking ball, and then lands on the ground, amid the rubble and a construction site’s stuff and machines, including a bulldozer from which jumps out a gang…
West Side Story (1961)
It started as a typical conflict between families and political allegiances in the 13th and 14th century Italy, in this case in Verona, which was turned into a literary work in the 15th century by some Italian writers. The narrative became then the source of plays, including in Spain, and it is was in the…
Chinatown
The titles are an obvious throwback to the period where the genres of crime stories, gangster films, and film noirs were emerging as defining and popular productions of the American cinema, new features capturing the public imagination, churning out stars, widening the range of the movies in terms…
Nóz w wodize – A Knife in the Water
The plot of “Nóz w wodize – A Knife in the Water” is quite simple to sum up. A couple driving through the Polish countryside meets a hitchhiker; they invite the young man to spend the rest of the day with them; but then the three struggle to get along and a strange tension builds up all along…
The Pianist
History comes as a shock, a terrible explosion interrupting life: as Wladyslaw Szpilman records compositions by Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin for the Polish radio, distant and disturbing booming sounds can be heard before the glasses of the window of the building of the radio and the partition wall of…
Judgment at Nuremberg
This is a fiction: the film does not reconstruct real events but the plot is based on the so-called Justice Trials that took place in 1947 within the wider frame of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. The first trials of the system famously dealt with the surviving political leaders of the defunct Nazi…
The Zone of Interest
While the screen remains dark, the plangent humming sound quietly, slowly lets the chirping of a bird out, and then gives way to the delightful and pure noise of a lively wildlife. The screen, at long last, displays images nicely fitting with those fresh…
Schindler’s List
The weirdest, most egregious, most hotly debated images in “Schindler’s List” are the still long shots and the more roving and medium ones focused on a walking little girl, who is anxiously wondering where to go and what to do amid the mayhem that the Nazi soldiers are wrecking as they hunt down and…
One from the Heart
Over three days, from the eve of Independence Day to the day after, in Las Vegas, Hank and Frannie celebrate the fifth anniversary of their first encounter, break up, and try to find love again, with the awkward help of their respective best friends: Moe, Hank’s partner in a scrap dealer’s shop…
Vampyr
Even as the talking movies are slowly spreading, this is a typical silent movie, and a brilliant one. Long title cards explain a lot, even using a book to prod the plot to move along, nonprofessional actors perform with excess, the camera actually compounding the over-demonstrative posturing and…
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Graunens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror
Light is life while Death forever lurks in the shadow: this clear-cut opposition is nicely captured by the stark contrast of the images. The beginning of the first act is bathed in an exquisite bright light highlighting the happy faces of the happy couple made up of office worker Thomas Hutter…
The Addiction
Kathy is a PhD. student in philosophy at a New York university. One evening, on her way home, she is grabbed by a strange woman, rushed to an alleyway and thrown against a wall. Her aggressor then jumps at her neck and drinks…