Eric Rohmer’s Autumn Tale (Conte d’automne) is hard, precise, witty, overflowing with humanity. Completing the quartet Tales of the Four Seasons (whose Tale of Winter may be Rohmer’s masterpiece), this otherwise gentle comedy is also agonizingly suspenseful. The suspense hinges on whether Magali and Gérald, two middle-aged singles, will come together as a couple; it’s […]
Daily Archives: May 20, 2007
Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl (Le cri du hibou), a satire on compulsive human behavior, turns (for Chabrol, not for the first time) on a collision of city and country, in this case, Paris and the Vichy countryside, questioning our capacity to change, regardless of what move we make either topographically or on […]
Claude Chabrol has applied himself to the art of filmmaking for more than 45 years now, and The Flower of Evil (La fleur du mal) is billed as his fiftieth film. Among those of the nouvelle vague, the radical movement in French cinema begun in the mid-fifties that refreshed world cinema like nothing else until […]
Damion Dietz’s absorbing, minimalist Neverland is an updated version of Peter Pan in which the multi-ethnic Darling children, all adoptees, live in the white suburbs and Neverland is a seedy urban amusement park to which teen runaways are attracted and where they’re tormented and exploited. This is nearly a good movie (could anything having to […]
This hysterical film by Marc Evans is about a highly dysfunctional, in fact, deranged, non-working working-class Welsh family, out of which tumble secrets and delusions over the course of its trajectory. House of America is bizarre, to say the least, with much anguish, even some brother-sister incest, lots of arson, a mining company called Michigan, […]
Dennis Grunes 