Vastly underrated, wrongly dismissed by some as being “cold,” Marcel Carné’s Juliette ou La clef des songes engages the beauty of romance and the power of love. It is certainly not the equal of Jean Cocteau’s splendiferous Beauty and the Beast (1946), with which it shares some elements; but then what is? Carné has made […]
Monthly Archives: March 2012
At 136 minutes, Mervyn LeRoy’s low-key Home Before Dark, about a woman back home after she is released from a mental hospital, probably requires a bottle of good unblended scotch to navigate and get through; but it’s largely absorbing, attractively wintry gray (the black-and-white cinematography is by Joseph Biroc), and beautifully acted by Jean Simmons […]
“Who knows what makes us cry.” Le grand jeu (The Full Deck) is an engrossing, highly entertaining melodrama that flashes glints of considerably more depth than Jacques Feyder and Charles Spaak’s chiseled script and Feyder’s roomy, flowing direction can deliver on. I enjoyed almost every minute of its two hours but, apart from one brilliant […]
The ridiculously titled A Dangerous Method is perhaps Canada’s David Cronenberg’s most infuriating film. It more or less tries to dim the spotlight that two other films nearly a decade earlier cast on Sabina Spielrein, the Russian Jewish Freudian psychoanalyst and pioneering child psychologist whom the Nazis murdered, along with her two young children. While […]
“I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.” ― José Saramago Prolific Jon Jost’s videographed Imagens de uma cidade perdida, from Portugal and South Korea, now that I’ve seen it, replaces Lars von Trier’s Melancholia as my choice for the best “film” of 2011. Jost has written about “the […]
Dennis Grunes 