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”), Jos Stelling in 1977 (“Rembrandt fecit 1669”), or Charles Matton in 1999 (“Rembrandt”). What sets right away director Peter Greenaway’s effort….

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…

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…