I have added the following entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films list. Recurrent civil war since 1983 in Sri Lanka has had a devastating effect on the land and its people. Writer-director Vimukthi Jayasundara was both rewarded and censured for his Kiarostaminian Sulanga Enu Pinisa, winning the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature) at […]
Daily Archives: August 30, 2008
Writer-director Jacques Doillon, who is the father of three girls, to his everlasting disgrace made Ponette, a pornographic exploitation of a four-year-old’s coping with the death (by road accident) of her mother. It’s a piece of “sensitive” trash. Preposterously, Victoire Thivisol won best actress at Venice; the child does nothing but react as she has […]
What, if anything, does Aleksandr Sokurov’s Krug vtoroy have to do with Dante’s second circle of Hell, to which those who lusted, such as Francesca and her brother-in-law, are consigned? Regardless, the film is visually transparent, with its color repressed almost to the point of monochrome. This is, after all, a film in which a […]
Dennis Grunes 