Gösta Ekman is wonderful as concert violinist Holger Brandt, who has an affair with his child’s piano instructor, Anita Hoffman. A point of interest of Gustaf Molander’s moving melodrama Intermezzo, from Sweden, is the contrast between Ekman’s old-style, somewhat grand but extraordinarily disciplined acting and 21-year-old Ingrid Bergman’s moodier, less contained acting, to which she […]
Daily Archives: September 7, 2008
Joseph Losey’s The Criminal (originally released in the States, truncated, as The Concrete Jungle) doesn’t explain much; viewers get to feel they are crossing a complex of lives at some middle point. This bleak, incisive film about prison culture and the workday underworld outside, which somewhat taps a Jean-Pierre Melvillean vein, doesn’t feel packaged. It […]
From the Ivory Coast, France, Burkina Faso and Switzerland, in the Bambara and Baule languages, Adanggaman is the chronicle of a West African village’s fate in the late seventeenth century. King Adanggaman, who has determined that he himself is the absolute law, rules capriciously and viciously. He orders the torching of the village in question, […]
