Somewhere in Africa that was formerly, or is currently, colonized by the French, war rages. Both the government and the rebels have ordered Maria to vacate ex-husband André’s coffee plantation, which she has been running with perseverence and an iron grip. French soldiers in an overhead helicopter have beseeched her to evacuate the country immediately. […]
Monthly Archives: April 2011
Since childhood, Albert—“Bertie”—has stammered and stuttered. Engaged by his wife, Elizabeth, Australian-born therapist Lionel Logue endeavors to correct this, over time, in idiosyncratic sessions with the royal client, who is second in line of succession. In 1936, his father dies; when his brother abdicates to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson, Bertie becomes Britain’s King George VI. […]
Clint Eastwood is a cold, distant, crabby man who, as director, makes cold, distant, crabby films. One scarcely associates charm with Eastwood. However, the final five minutes or so of his Hereafter are indeed charming, full of the quiet, soulful spark of budding romance. For the most part, the film is tedious, morose, repressed; but […]
The financial success of Universal’s The Wolf Man the previous year prompted 20th Century-Fox to put out its own werewolf movie. Alas, German-born John Brahm’s The Undying Monster, from a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, is among the worst films ever made: a mere hour that seems like 2¼ hours in the watching. There must […]
Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd. Writer-director Hiner Saleem is an Iraqi Kurd, and his trenchant, deliriously lovely tragicomedy Kilomètre zéro, like so many of Ghobadi’s films, is a “road picture.” The film is from Iraq, France and Finland. In the 1980s, Ako, an electrician from the village of Amedi in Kurdistan, is impressed […]
Word has arrived that director Sidney Lumet, 86, has died. A dozen reasons to honor the late Sidney Lumet: Henry Fonda and E. G. Marshall in “12 Angry Men” Joanne Woodward and Anna Magnani in “The Fugitive Kind” Dean Stockwell, Katharine Hepburn and Jason Robards Jr. in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” Juano Hernandez in […]
Its journalistic approach helps make Emmanuel Laurent’s documentary about the rise and demise of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard’s friendship, Deux de la Vague, dry as dust; nor is it helped by frequent inserts of young French actress Isild Le Besco reading clippings and such to underscore the momentous, somewhat academic history that the bleeding […]
