Drawn from Henry James’s “The Altar of the Dead” and “The Beast of the Jungle,” La chambre verte is one of François Truffaut’s oddest and most deeply affecting films. It is set ten years after the end of the Great War and was made ten years after Jean-Luc Godard’s mobilization of street protest against the […]
Daily Archives: February 4, 2008
The same year that his marvelous Shadows (1959) was belatedly released writer-director John Cassavetes made his first brief foray into commercial filmmaking. (Wife Gena Rowlands’s sort-of stardom would bring him back to its fringes.) Too Late Blues is a powerful drama about struggling white jazz musicians in Los Angeles. This bleak, beautifully acted film led […]
Tony Gatlif, the maker of the stupendous Romany musical Latcho Drom (1993), scores another wonderful film with I Come, a tragic musical from Spain. Opening with one of them, the film is studded with flamenco, Andalusian Gypsy, and Egyptian musical performances—documentary events with fictional characters in attendance. The fictional story interrupts these events or binds […]
Dennis Grunes 