The most brilliant film from anywhere in the 1990s, D’Est (From the East) is the work of Chantal Äkerman, the world’s greatest Belgian-born filmmaker, the world’s greatest woman filmmaker, and the world’s greatest living Jewish filmmaker. Along with Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Äkerman is cinema’s reigning humanist, and for more than thirty years she has been […]
Daily Archives: March 22, 2007
Recently I viewed for the first time The Hours (2002), an excruciating film that, in order to express (according to the filmmaker, Stephen Daldrey) the power of books, had all sorts of characters making decisions and living their lives under the influence of characters in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Among other things, I thought […]
I find myself short of comprehending Lan Yu, especially with regards to recent and current Chinese legal and political practices, as becomes strikingly clear near the end of the film when, viewing it, I literally gasped aloud “Death penalty!” at the revelation that this is what the protagonist, Chen Handong, the head of a trading […]
The two most magical films in existence may be Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931), the first one light-magical, and the second, darkly magical. Both came out of Germany, although Dreyer, one of cinema’s three or four greatest artists, was a Dane; both films fully exploit the almost primitive capacity of […]
So often it is the case that Hollywood films exploit the audience’s penchant for escape that it is an especial pleasure when a few of these films engage this impulse of ours. The pull of nostalgia has become a mainstay in American culture; Orson Welles’s beautiful The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) finds this “culture,” like fashion, […]
Dennis Grunes 