The same year as his famous Meshi (Repast), Mikio Naruse made another, not-so-famous film: Maihime, based on the novel by future Nobel Prize-winner Yasunari Kawabata, which Kaneto Shindô adapted. It is the melancholy story of Namiko Yagi, a former ballet dancer who currently runs a ballet school in postwar Tokyo. Although they have two teenaged […]
Monthly Archives: November 2011
The Israeli Zarim, by the young writing-directing team of Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor, is an absolute delight and as romantic as anything by Hitchcock. Fluent and vivid in its use of handheld camera, it is also one of the screen’s most moving romances. Eyal and Rana, football enthusiasts, meet in Berlin during the 2006 […]
Killer Pierre Barbier hides in a musician’s basement in a suburban Paris slum in Porte des Lilas, which director René Clair, adapting René Fallet’s novel La Grande Ceinture, describes as a “comédie dramatique.” Inside a bar a newspaper account of the event that has made Barbier a hunted fugitive is read aloud as the camera […]
Moving ahead is the aim of life. Horton Bucks is on the road, but his destination is spiritually “behind” him. From the West, he is heading into the past—in his case, rural Missouri, for the occasion of his mother’s funeral. He will be reunited with his younger brother, Stanton, his father, Gus, and a girl […]
Yves Allégret’s dynamic, grippingly atmospheric Les orgueilleux comes from a story by Jean-Paul Sartre titled “Typhus,” although Gabicz and Klinowski cite instead a story, perhaps the same one, whose “bitterly ironic” title translates as “Love, the Redeemer.” (There is no such bitter irony in Allégret’s film, which ends, straight, in a Hollywood clinch.) Yet others […]
Advocates for The Tree of Life, writer-director Terrence Malick’s fifth film in nearly forty years, claim for it a visionary quality. They must have a shabby sense of vision. Grafting onto a rudimentary family melodrama, set (like Malick’s childhood) around early-1950s Waco, Texas, an awesome account of the origin of the universe and the evolution […]
In Berlin, “She”—the only name the film gives her—wanders on a drunken binge and in an alcoholic stupor in Bildnis einer Trinkerin. Aller jamais retour (Portrait of a Female Drunkard. Ticket of No Return), at its best a remarkable film from West Germany written, directed and cinematographed by Ulrike Ottinger. She is richly, elegantly dressed […]
