Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while […]
Daily Archives: February 27, 2007
In grainy black and white, its style journalistic-cinéma-vérité, its length a trim, no-nonsenscial hour and a quarter, Bolivia is a small gem, sharply observant, finely expressive. It follows Freddy, a Bolivian husband and father of four, who has separated from his family in order to find work in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he tries to […]
There is no accounting for taste, and there is no accounting for those who maintain the fiction that the ’70s were anything other than the dreariest decade in the history of American cinema. There were, of course, some excellent films: Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977), John Huston’s Fat City (1972) and […]
“Grace, irony, gravity, timeless loveliness: Greta Garbo is cinema’s most enchanting tragedienne—all in all, its greatest actress.” This is how I described Garbo in a list of the fifty greatest film actors and actresses. Grand Hotel, which won the 1932 Oscar as best picture, gave Garbo her most famous line, the one that capped her […]
Roberto Rossellini is the filmmaker most important to the Italian Neorealist movement. His Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), two beautiful works, are justly celebrated. However, the movement’s singular masterpiece is his next film, Germany, Year Zero (Germania, Anno Zero)—although it’s a measure of the breadth of Rossellini’s body of work that one of […]
Dennis Grunes 