French-born Rachid Bouchareb, whose heritage is Algerian, scored a coup with his film Indigènes, which moved then-Premier Jacques Chirac to unfreeze military pensions for soldiers from the French colonies, mostly from North and West Africa, who fought for Free France in World War II. Chirac called what he did an “act of justice”—one marking an […]
Daily Archives: January 12, 2008
The Reign of Terror has begun, bringing Georges Danton (Gérard Depardieu, powerful) back to Paris, in 1793, from self-imposed exile to oppose former Revolutionary compatriot Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak, brilliant) on the matter of its continuation. Danton arrives by coach on a rainy night. What he sees in the square is a dreamlike, painterly apparition: […]
Art and entertainment are, generally, mutually exclusive categories, and so it is the case here: no one could mistake South Florida’s Joseph Adler’s cult classic Revenge Is My Destiny as anything serious or substantial. It tells a story with superficial characters, the major one of which is a wounded Vietnam veteran, Ross Archer. The film […]
Striking black-and-white compositions aren’t enough to navigate the sluggish pace and Twilight Zone-ery of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature, Otoshiana, written by Kôbô Abe. A man who has “deserted” the mine where he last worked, seeking employment at a unionized mine, takes his young son to a remote village where he hopes to find such work. […]
