Michael Winterbottom’s In This World is a British film that follows two Afghan refugees, 16-year-old Jamal and older cousin Enayatullah, on their trek from Pakistan to England in search of freedom and a better life. The two leads play or just are themselves. The film’s nature is unclear. Is it documentary, or faux-documentary into which […]
Daily Archives: October 16, 2007
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Abbas Kiarostami’s experiment, in ten parts, consists of conversations between the driver of an automobile in Tehran—a taxi driver, I presume—and her front-seat passenger, […]
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Born in Beirut, Lamia Joreige returned there from France, where she has lived for twenty years, for her documentary inquiry Houna wa roubbama hounak, […]
Critic Gavin Smith has called Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark the first “genuinely tragic musical.” While I think G. W. Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931) qualifies as that almost seventy years sooner, Dancer in the Dark is neither the frivolous escapism (think Singin’ in the Rain) nor sentimental garbage (think West […]
From Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is singularly un-Dogmetic. Each chapter introduction includes recorded rock music, accompanied by a gorgeous bit of computer-enhanced Nature imagery. Moreover, the film is ultimately headed toward the supernatural and special effects. The offspring of atheists, Trier considers himself religious, but in the humanistic manner […]
Dennis Grunes 