Beautifully written and directed by Italy’s 80-year-old Ermanno Olmi, and gorgeously photographed by his son, Fabio, Il villaggio di cartone is a spare, mysterious, deeply moving parable about a group of “illegal aliens” from Africa who, seeking sanctuary from the police, occupy a defunct church whose 80-year-old priest, despite its deconsecration, refuses to vacate it, […]
Monthly Archives: September 2012
Initially creating leisurely rural scenes, both contemporary and “period,” and playing these off a dense, repetitive aural collage of politically-minded voiceovers, Le vent d’est is Jean-Luc Godard’s heartfelt response to the disarray and demoralization of the French Left in the wake of May ’68. Shot in Italy and made by the filmmaking collective to which […]
A heart attack prevented Henri-Georges Clouzot from completing the filming of what some have nevertheless projected as his likely masterpiece, L’enfer, the script to which Clouzot’s widow sold to Claude Chabrol in the 1990s, resulting in Chabrol’s brilliant film with the same title (1994). The material details a man’s waking nightmare as he steadily slips […]
Two lethally twisted mothers—acted shrilly and theatrically and with scant humanity or insight by always worthless Miranda Richardson and once-charming Leslie Caron—plot the coordinates of intersecting domestic tragedies in Louis Malle’s ridiculous, brain-dead Damage, one of the half-dozen most grotesque movies ever made. David Hare, no less, wrote the damn thing, from the novel by […]
Slack, shallow, almost bereft of any entertainment value, Yolanda and the Thief is the worst film by Vincente Minnelli that doesn’t star Barbra Streisand. It is a musical romance where most of the “romance” is offscreen (I guess), despite Fred Astaire’s lead role contains only two dances, and—this, the year after Meet Me in St. […]
Dennis Grunes 