From Burkina Faso, Tasuma centers on a veteran of France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, whose robust patience has been worn thin by bureaucratic nonresponsiveness. He has been waiting two years for his pension for ten years, two months and three days of wartime service. After his bona fide application and follow-up letters of […]
Monthly Archives: September 2007
Alain Delon claimed his most melancholy role, and a brutal one, as hitman Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s electrifying Le samouraï. Jef doesn’t make mistakes; his careful arrangement of details, including alibis, makes him arrest-proof. But his murder of a nightclub owner generates unaccustomed eyewitnesses, one of whom, the club singer, got a good look. […]
Denmark’s Lars von Trier is contemporary cinema’s imp of the perverse. Inspired by Pirandello and Brecht, his Direktøren for det hele takes aim at theatrical acting and big business. By targeting each through the other, this dazzlingly clever comedy suggests that capitalism is a charade, a soulless, convoluted performance. Ravn owns and runs an information […]
One approaches with some trepidation any one of the fifteen or so film versions of Don Quixote, the very early seventeenth-century Spanish novel by Cervantes, in full, Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra. Brilliantly philosophical and richly colored, the book, despite a simple plot, is considered by many the single greatest novel ever written. My own […]
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Murderers Are Among Us had been the title Fritz Lang intended for M, but German censors rejected the implication […]
Dennis Grunes 