After an excruciating and exhausting shooting marred by incidents and a conflict with his main producer, Charles Pathé, forcing him to seek fresh funds in a Germany still viewed with distrust in his native France and a Russia turned communist in the wake of the 1917 revolution, director Abel Gance…
Category: Review
La religieuse
Her face is barely visible, bent over the prayer stool near the altar, wrapped in the white veil completing the gorgeous white dress, so distant in the stately long shot capturing the moment. Her voice, crucially, is also barely audible, her “No” getting lost in the distance while one of the nuns…
“Ba wang bie ji – Farewell My Concubine”
The crisp black and white cinematography slowly looks flawed as another color emerges, nestled in details, giving the pictures an eerie texture. It is the borders of a flag or a jacket that discreetly change but then the change becomes widespread and striking…
Der blaue Engel – The Blue Angel
This is the scathing relation of a fall, relying on ironic and cruel repetitions and the heartbreaking contrast between miens and attitudes that could not have ever matched – love as a senseless thrill, turning awry. A detail proves to be not just…
Lola
She gives her name to the debut feature by Jacques Demy but she does not show up right away, quite the contrary. In fact the story of Lola starts with the wanderings of the three men loving her, three quite different fellows whose comings and goings across the native town of the director, Nantes…
Point Blank
Sets of dramatic images, often shot at bizarre, slanted angles in a broadly dark cinematography, blatantly messing with timelines and circumstances, are edited in rapid fire, stirring confusion and getting the audience lost, without clues and a clear narrative direction, even as they step into this…
Jodaeiye Nader az Simin – A Separation
Of course, there is the issue of what could happen to their daughter. The wife wants the girl to travel with her, the husband does not – that closes the case, as his approval is required. But the biggest issue is Nader’s father: he has the Alzheimer’s disease and his son looks after him in his apartment (his…
Ta’m e guilass – Taste of Cherry
The film features the tropes of a road movie but if the white SUV rides endlessly dirty roads it remains in fact inside a small area, going on round circles, winding through the same hairpin bends, driving along the same quarries. The point is not to reach another destination or to explore a new land and…
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
It begins as a feminist statement. Realizing with embarrassment and surprise she has never fully owned her life, never had anything belonging to her, never carved out a place of her own, Lucy Muir, after a year spent, as demanded by tradition and property, mourning her beloved husband…
All About Eve
Coming out of the shadows, quite literally as the camera shots her for the first time standing against a door in poorly-lit passage leading to the back facade of a New York theater after an evening performance, Eve Harrington proves swiftly apt at winning the trust of people who would…
Aku wa sonzai shinai – Evil Does Not Exist
This is the world of the forest. Tall and awesome, even in the dead of the winter, trees are everywhere, spreading to the horizon, surrounding you at every turn, keeping cities away from your mind. When you look up, tilt your head backward, lie on the ground, the sky becomes a richly…
Ah-ga-ssi – The Handmaiden
Sook-hee is a member of a family of petty thieves surviving without much trouble under the Japanese occupation in the 1930s Korea. Among her sidekicks there is so-called Count Fujiwara. The aristocrat offers her to take part in an ambitious scheme: helping him to marry…
Hwa-nyeo – Woman of Fire
Splatter of blood on a rock and on a face: this is the grisly end of a rape as a young woman from the countryside fights back the two blacksmiths who have assaulted her and her best friend. Blood, however, would not get staunched in the course of Myeong-ja’s life…
Hanyo – The Housemaid
A mundane scene of domestic life: a husband and his wife argue over a newspaper report about a man who fell in love with his maid, causing a scandal, while their two children play cat’s cradle amazingly fast. They are in a cozy room, nicely furnished and decorated, the husband wears fashionable…
Cléo de 5 à 7
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…