A brilliant documentary from Mexico, Tropic of Cancer is essential viewing. A stark examination of impoverished life in post-NAFTA Mexico turns into a powerful consideration of how hard some people must work just to survive. This is the third piece by Eugenio Polgovsky, a kid in his twenties who wrote, directed, digitally videographed, and edited. […]
Daily Archives: January 30, 2007
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, who authored the script for last year’s execrable Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), Crash has nothing to do with David Cronenberg’s same-titled 1996 film or with the J. G. Ballard book on which the Cronenberg film is based, one of the most brilliant English-language novels of the […]
Dedicated to street children and their perseverence through incredible hardship, La petite vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) comes to us from Senegal, Switzerland and France. It’s a Third World story whose tone is complex and highly ironical. Djibril Diop Mambéty, the director of Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena, […]
Directing a feature from his own script for the first time, Michel Gondry transcends the cranky foolishness and hard-to-follow narrative trickery of his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003), for whose motion-picture story he won an Oscar. On a number of levels, The Science of Sleep (La science des rêves) flies. Its protagonist, Stéphane […]
Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965) remains one of the most impressive debuts in Italian cinema, and Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) is, if anything, even more remarkable—further evidence (following proof after proof after proof) that Bellocchio is what he indeed seemed to be nearly forty years ago: after Antonioni and Rossellini, Italy’s […]
Dennis Grunes 