About an undercover police attempt to identify and capture the serial killer of gay men in New York City’s s&m (sadism/masochism), b&d (bondage/dominance) and leather subcultures, William Friedkin’s soulless Cruising enraged the gay community when it was being made and is still a shallow, seedy, unpleasant “entertainment.” The undercover cop in Friedkin’s film is played […]
Daily Archives: February 11, 2008
Released in the States as A Woman’s Decision, Bilans kwartalny—literally, Quarterly Balance, a.k.a. The Balance—is writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi’s harsh, detailed portrait of life in Communist Poland. Marta Sieminska (Maja Komorowska, superb) is a middle-aged accountant in a state office and a union representative, in which capacity she supports a co-worker suspected of embezzlement. The film […]
To honor the memory of his traveling ethnomusicologist father, a young Parisian, Stéphane, foot-journeys in Romania to find Nora Luca, whose singing blessed his father’s hearing toward the end. Tony Gatlif’s stubborn, colorful The Crazy Stranger begins with the boy on a frozen, snow-covered road. At night he is (mis?)taken for a godsend and appropriated […]
Dennis Grunes 