Although it relates symbolically to reality from the get-go, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s mesmerizing debut feature, Innocence, unfolds as a dream. In a fairy-tale forest its girls’ boarding school, to which new students arrive in coffins and parents never visit, eludes definition, literalism. The French film opens with the transport of an indeterminate something that I guess […]
Monthly Archives: January 2008
Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood begins in 1898 New Mexico, when Daniel Plainview breaks his leg in his silver mine before discovering a wealth there of black gold. Why does Anderson set the story’s beginning earlier than the novel does? Perhaps to give it a toehold in the […]
Marva Nabili, an Iranian émigré fleeing the Islamic Revolution, settled in the United States. Her first film, The Sealed Soil (1977), made my list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Her second, Nightsongs, is (like its main female character) beautifully observant of social environment, human nature and the human soul. It is essential […]
Very nearly forty, Andrzej Munk died in a road accident in 1961, ending the career of the Polish filmmaker whom Roman Polanski considered his mentor. Munk’s Man on the Tracks, Eroica (1957), Cross-Eyed Luck (1959) and Passenger (1961) constitute a sterling body of work. Indeed, the last, completed by Witold Lesiewicz, using stills, and released […]
French censors held back the release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat for three years—until after the Algerian War. It’s the love story of two young terrorists. Unbeknownst to her boyfriend, Véronique belongs to the National Liberation Front, which is dedicated to the cause of Algierian independence from colonialist France; Bruno, to the right-wing, nationalist […]
Dennis Grunes 