Civil war continues. Jan and Eva Rosenberg, both musicians (read: apolitical artists), have retreated to an island, where they farm. They are an alternately warm, good-natured and combative couple. Eva (Liv Ullmann, giving her best-ever performance—best actress, Guldbagge Award, National Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review) lightly, charmingly tells Jan over dinner outdoors, […]
Monthly Archives: January 2009
The courtship and early marriage of Ingmar Bergman’s parents in early twentieth-century Sweden, a poor, self-sensitive Lutheran priest and a cultured girl from a wealthy family: this is the narrative territory of Danish filmmaker Bille August’s somber, absorbing, beautifully scored Den Goda viljan. August, working from a script by Bergman, won the Palme d’Or at […]
Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war included the massacres of Palestinian civilians in refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila. Phalangists, Lebanese Christian militants, committed these atrocities, but with Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s heads-up. Under orders, then-soldier Ari Folman, writer-director-star of Vals Im Bashir, set off flares that in turn set the Phalangists to their murderous task. […]
“Did you know that all women in Rio have sex before marriage? All of them”: Nine-year-old Josué says this in a rest stop lavatory to the trucker giving him a ride north as the boy, whose mother was killed by a car before his eyes, searches out his father, who abandoned them both some time […]
This flat-sounding, laborious film opens with emphatic voiceover superimposed on wide-angle shots of Anatolia, ancient home of Greeks and Armenians that the Turks long ago conquered: “My name is Elia Kazan. I am a Greek by blood, a Turk by birth, and an American because my uncle made a journey.” Like Roberto Benigni’s Life Is […]
Dennis Grunes 