Captivating, fascinating, warm-hearted, Close-up (Nema-ye Nazdik) staked out the claim, made for him by critics, filmgoers and such fellow filmmakers as Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, that Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami is the premier filmmaker currently at work in the world today. The film, in Farsi, mixes pure documentary and documentary reenactments. On a city bus […]
Daily Archives: February 22, 2007
A legendary film, Destiny of a Man (Sudba cheloveka) is in fact one of the few notable Soviet films of the 1950s.* This is in part due to the fact that Nikita Khrushchev, who replaced Josef Stalin as the Soviet Union’s premier in 1953, lacked his predecessor’s interest in cinema as a tool of propaganda, […]
Leave everything behind. — Abraham A celebration of the complex ironies and the sweetness of life, Divan is to be savored, like an invitation to a rebbe’s Tish. Yiddish comes to us in a steady stream, always explained or subtitled, in Pearl Gluck’s charming, refreshing video diary of her most unusual adventure in Hungary as […]
Dennis Grunes 