I wasn’t the least bit impressed by his White Balloon (1995), which (as far as I’m concerned) doesn’t benefit even from having been written by Abbas Kiarostami, and I was only a little more impressed by The Mirror (1997), also about a child.* (So many Iranian films are about children, I presume, to be “humanistic” […]
Daily Archives: February 10, 2007
One doesn’t normally associate the name Mervyn LeRoy with musicals. The most substantial part of the director’s reputation derives from edgy dramatic films he made at Warner Bros. during the 1930s: Little Caesar (1930), Five Star Final (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Three on a Match (1932), The World Changes […]
Life is full of coincidences; dovetailing incidents suggest a pattern, even a thread of fate. We receive reality as a kind of dream. A man tells his wife about an extramarital thought of his involving a fifteen-year-old girl, a sigh, a possibility, that occurred on their recent stay in Denmark, prompting her to tease him […]
Emporte-Moi (Set Me Free), by Swiss-born Québecois documentarian and fictional filmmaker Léa Pool, is a very lovely, very sad, emotionally highly complex film about an impoverished, struggling, emotionally chaotic family in 1963 Montréal. The film is likely autobiographical; the central character, Hanna, is thirteen years old—Pool’s age in 1963—and by the end of the film […]
War—humanity’s disfigurement: this is the theme of Kaneto Shindô’s Onibaba (The Hole), a film that has become a minor classic. Sixteenth-century Japan; civil war. In a small hut by a river, along with her daughter-in-law, a woman awaits her soldier-son’s return. It’s a harsh time. The crops have failed. In order to survive, the two […]
Dennis Grunes 