“Perversion exists; and, to describe it in its most crushing and tragic form, I had to go as far as possible without being afraid of traumatizing the audience.” — Henri-Georges Clouzot Dazzling and overwhelming, somehow both sumptuous and austere, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s last film is among his most intriguing work. La prisonnière—variously called in English The […]
Monthly Archives: May 2012
In a phenomenal performance that brought him best actor prizes at Berlin and from the British Academy, Peter Finch plays 42-year-old Johnnie Byrne, a just-reëlected Labour Party member of Parliament the reason for whose exclusion from his prime minister’s Labour Government takes time in coming to light. When he is finally told, it seems as […]
Voted by critics in the 1990s as one of the ten best films from the former Czechoslovakia, Slnko v sieti—alternately translated as The Sun in a Net or Sunshine Caught in a Net—derives from three short stories by Alfonz Bednár, which he himself adapted. Brilliantly directed by Štefan Uher (like Bednár, a Slovak), the film […]
Excruciating, farfetched sentimental melodrama, closer to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird than to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, about a child’s traumatic response to his father’s death in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The funeral, where an empty coffin is buried because his father’s body was never recovered, […]
Advertising their 35mm camera, the LomoKino website invites potential customers to “go back to the early days of motion picture” while awakening their own “analogue cinematic fantasies”—as Thailand’s reigning auteur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has done (except for a digital finale) with his exquisite, haunting “Ashes.” This short work—since its premiere at Cannes last Friday it has […]
Dennis Grunes 