Life is fragile and fleeting, along with everything in it—and that includes male friendships as well as romantic relationships. Writer-director Olivier Assayas has created a complex masterpiece with his brilliantly scripted tragicomedy Fin août, début septembre, one whose especial focus consists of two relationships in which Gabriel participates. Gabriel is a young man who doesn’t […]
Daily Archives: April 19, 2009
A tender, elusive Hong Kong lesbian melodrama, one as suffused with haunted memory as anything by Resnais, Hu die establishes Yan Yan Mak as a major filmmaker. One is drawn into the dream of reality that she has created, and one gets lost there. Testing the dream is a shard of incontestable reality: the televised […]
Robert Florey was able to draw on firsthand experience as a U.S. immigrant from Europe—from Paris, in his case, not Budapest—for The Face Behind the Mask, the mordant saga of Janos Szabo, who sees his American hopes, along with his face, go up in smoke when he is trapped in a fleabag hotel fire. Thereafter, […]
Shot on the Ganges River at Varanasi (formerly Benares) in northern India, a center of Hinduism, Sanskrit learning and Buddhist pilgrimage, the (correctly) black-and-white Boatman, in Hindi and English, follows boatman Gopal Maji and takes in a plethora of sights both tranquil and troubling. Directed and photographed by Eritrean-born Gianfranco Rosi, this superlative film from […]
Dennis Grunes 