Writer-director Jacques Doillon apparently makes only excrutiatingly fake films. His 1996 Ponette, about a four-year-old girl’s coping with her mother’s accidental death, makes a show of being sensitive when all the time it is headed for a grotesquely painless resolution. By contrast, Petits frères, which portrays disaffected boys, mostly black and Muslim, in “the projects” […]
Daily Archives: October 18, 2008
Spanning some twenty years, Sergei Bodrov’s film about the future Genghis Khan, Mongol, launches a promised trilogy that I worried would be of the order of Peter Jackson’s dull, dim-witted Lord of the Rings. I ought to have considered better that Bodrov had made the wonderful Prisoner of the Mountains (1996). Mongol is both epic […]
Released from German imprisonment during the Occupation, Robert Bresson made his first feature, which, despite an exaggerated lead performance by Renée Faure, is brilliant. Les anges du péché is spiritually intense; watching it is an overwhelming, if unsettling, experience. The Dominican convent here is Béthanie—a reminder of its proximity in Bresson’s Au hasard, Balthazar (1966), […]
Dennis Grunes 