With David Lynch and Gus Van Sant, Jon Jost is one of the three great U.S. filmmakers currently working. Passages is my favorite 2006 film, and Over Here will likely be my favorite 2007 U.S. film. (Homecoming, for which Over Here is a companion-piece, is my favorite 2004 U.S. film.) But Jost has been at […]
Daily Archives: October 26, 2007
At the end of Children Remember the Holocaust (1996), the exquisite documentary aimed at the young that Mark Gordon made with the capital he amassed from producing Speed (1994), Keanu Reeves pleads gently: “Open your heart.” Reeves might have been addressing the character he himself plays in Johnny Mnemonic, a futuristic pilgrim’s progress that takes […]
In the early 1960s Lilli Palmer and Charles Boyer, no less, starred in a German-language farce titled Julia, Du bist zauberhaft, known in the States as Adorable Julia. Alfred Weidenmann directed (heavily), from a script based on one or more plays that was or were, in turn, based on the novella Theatre by W. Somerset […]
Somersault in a Coffin (wonderful English title!*) tumbled here from Turkey, where it won the annually given national award as Best Film. (It also won both the Critics’ Award and the Golden Antigone as Best Film at Montpellier, the second prize, the Silver Alexander, at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and both a special jury […]
I haven’t the faintest idea what Nun va Goldoon means in English, but an online Farsi-English dictionary translates nun as “tree trunk,” which suits neither title by which this Iranian film goes: Bread and Flower; A Moment of Innocence. I suspect the latter; but the crucial (and conclusive) shot that encapsulates the “moment of innocence” […]
Dennis Grunes 