Perhaps you recall that Farinelli, the Belgian film by Gérard Corbiau, won the Golden Globe as best foreign-language film about a dozen years ago. At the time I didn’t go see it because I didn’t believe the movie would be much good—it isn’t—and I dreaded the thought of watching a movie about a castrato. George […]
Daily Archives: July 10, 2007
It took Gus Van Sant’s phenomenal Elephant to trump Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, or Distant, from Turkey for the top prize at Cannes in 2003. Those who voted were correct, both in ranking Elephant higher and in ranking Uzak nearly as high. (Uzak won the Grand Prix, the honor just below the Palme d’Or.) Perhaps […]
From Poland, Edward Zebrowski’s Transfiguration Hospital, from Stanislaw Lem’s first novel, is a stunning piece of work that I recommend to anyone who might be interested in anything like it. It takes place in 1943 in a country mental asylum, to which a young doctor arrives. He refuses to become part of the complacency and […]
As befits its directorial prize at Berlin for Michael Winterbottom, the most eclectic guy in show biz, and Mat Whitecross, The Road to Guantánamo is an amazing piece of work. So many of cinema’s most important works (and innumerable not so important ones) exist on a sliding continuum whose opposite poles are documentary and fiction; […]
Café Lumière is a “Tokyo story,” directed by Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien, from a script by Hou and longtime collaborator Chu Tien-wen, in homage to the maker of Tokyo Story (1953), Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu, on the occasion of the centennial of Ozu’s birth. Ozu, perhaps the greatest filmmaker of all time, died in 1963. Of Ozu’s […]
Dennis Grunes 