Kim Stanley (best actress, New York critics, National Board of Review) gives a tremendous performance as unhinging psychic Myra Savage, who impresses a weak-willed, asthmatic spouse, Billy, into a dangerous scheme to bring celebrity to her, one involving kidnapping a schoolgirl whose parents are wealthy, extracting a ransom, and divining at her weekly séance the […]
Monthly Archives: August 2012
Nearly a century after the publication of Thomas Hardy’s novel on which it is based, the “mod” writer and director of Darling (1965), Frederic Raphael and John Schlesinger, respectively, surprised everyone by making the big-budget film version of Far from the Madding Crowd. By this time a pastoral period-piece, the three-hour portrait of rural Victorian […]
I take my Jean-Pierre Léaud, perhaps my favorite film actor of the past fifty years, as I happen to find him, and an inside joke in Finnish writer-director Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre is that he is playing much the same creep that Jean-Luc Godard himself played in A bout de souffle (Godard, 1959). For the […]
Given the monumental nature of the Spanish Civil War, the outcome of which is one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, Frédéric Rossif’s compilation film, to which ghostly tracking shots have been added, amounts to a disappointing historical overview. Lorca’s capture and execution, vast human dislocation and suffering, Franco’s insufferable monstrosity: none of […]
A legendary film, Willi Forst’s Maskerade lives up to its exalted reputation. A Viennese operetta, it takes place in 1905, beginning with an extravagant high-society carnival party, full of music and dance and romantic rivalry, and ending amidst falling snow at night, a window glimpsing in on a tender moment of love. It is all […]
Dennis Grunes 