Despite its uncertain tone that unexpectedly resolves itself in comedy and romance, Anatole Litvak’s Anastasia touches on momentous subjects: historical ambiguities; the exploitation of these due to greed and the spirit of adventure; the problem of identity, including the eternal mystery of identity; however embroiled one is in history, an individual’s right to self-determination. However […]
Monthly Archives: December 2010
On the bombed streets of Kabul, on their own, a young brother and sister, Zahed and Gol-Ghotai, along with countless other children, scavenge to survive. The pair discover a charred book; like wood scraps, this can be sold for burning—for heat. The U.S.-Taliban war in Afghanistan—punctuating shots show a U.S. plane high in the sky—has […]
“Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?” Some facsimile of this facile question, which pessimistically resolves itself in an impending lobotomy, is tossed out at the end of Martin Scorsese’s slippery thriller, Shutter Island, but not before the film has entertainingly, but without any kind of depth, dragged […]
You may recall I was taken (as were many others) with Peruvian writer-director Claudia Llosa’s first film, Madeinusa (2006), a raw assault on neocolonialism’s assault on indigenous people that I described as being, before rigid determinism thins it out, “coarse, vulgar, vivid, at times visually and emotionally spectacular.” For me, a filmmaking star was born. […]
“He looked like an ordinary man.” “Do you know I’m Jewish?” Marcel Ophüls, son of Max, asks when a former associate of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” insists that Barbie didn’t dislike Jews. This moment electrifies in the brilliant, intricate 4½-hour Ophüls documentary Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie; it splits […]
Dennis Grunes 