The alleged decline in Woody Allen’s work allegedly helped occasion the stunning praise that his latest film, Match Point, garnered at Cannes in 2005; but, in truth, Allen’s prolific body of work has long been unpredictable as to quality, including in any given period films both good and bad. Pick your Woody-movie. While I delight […]
Daily Archives: February 21, 2007
A legendary filmmaker, Humberto Solás made Lucía (1968), arguably the most celebrated Cuban film of all time. Lucía depicts progressive changes in Cuba over more than half a century (beginning with the 1895 struggle to gain independence from Spain), where the formal design of the film—three episodes, each in its own visual style, showing the […]
Aleksei Gherman’s legendary My Friend, Ivan Lapshin (Moj drug Ivan Lapshin) has been called by Andrei Tarkovsky and many Russian critics, both Soviet and post-Soviet, the greatest Soviet film ever made. Its complex, stormy vision of drab provincial life in Soviet Russia has the visual elan to drug, and the power to sweep away, the […]
Jacques Becker himself said that he had the paintings of Pierre Auguste Renoir in mind when he made what is widely regarded as his masterpiece, Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet). The film’s vivid, bustling humanity, such as in scenes where working-class couples dance in close quarters at a riverside dance hall, recall, for instance, Renoir’s 1876 […]
Dennis Grunes 