Antonioni visually informs Jon Jost’s city portrait, which finds New York (God help it!) resembling L.A.: a sleek, cold surface beneath which apoplexy bubbles and erupts. Where is Woody’s Manhattan (1979), city of jazz and wistful romance? Only a museum’s Vermeer exhibit allows a humanistic respite from “business as usual”: gallery owners exploiting artists; Wall […]
Daily Archives: March 24, 2007
Vertigo, the richest blossoming of Alfred Hitchcock’s romantic and fatalistic sensibility, was disparaged by reviewers at the time of its original release and uncourted by the public. But the film has grown and grown in stature until, now, it ranks second only to Citizen Kane in the latest (2002) Sight & Sound poll of critics […]
Based on an actual incident that epitomizes the numbing of sympathy and compassion among (among others) the young during Ronald Reagan’s pathological presidency, Tim Hunter’s shrewd, at times witheringly funny River’s Edge, from a brilliant script by Neal Jimenez, observes a group of U.S. teens who fail to adequately respond to a classmate’s murder by […]
Although initially made as a silent, King Vidor’s most vibrant achievement would remain the finest American film musical until the Astaire-Rogers Swing Time (1936). Its rich use of Negro spirituals and work-songs underscores an absorbing theme: the role of evangelism in exploiting and channeling pain, disappointment and unease in the American landscape—here, in the case […]
From Mickey Spillane, Robert Aldrich’s film noir explodes even before its famous finale when—who knows? could be!—the world blows up. Despite his disarmingly gallant machismo, Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer adds to Bogart’s Sam Spade (in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon) an aura of protofascism; we watch him blur the line between man and boy, hero, […]
Dennis Grunes 