Solemn, fierce and combustible, Zero Dark Thirty, about the C.I.A.’s search to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, is one heck of a thriller. It is a simple revenge plot—bin Laden masterminded the 9/11 and other terrorist attacks—crossed with the Erin Brockovich-thing where a headstrong woman prevails over all the male jerks in the universe. […]
Monthly Archives: March 2013
The same year as the enormously expensive, spectacular War and Peace (Sergei Bondarchuk, 1967), another war film emerged from the U.S.S.R.—this one, modest, in black and white, and twenty times better. Gleb Panfilov’s V ogne broda net is a tremendous achievement. In 1917 civil war-torn Russia, as the Revolution approaches, young Tanya, a peasant, works […]
Dense and comprehensive, Days of Glory documents, through archival materials, partisan efforts against both Fascism and the German occupation in Italy, the liberation of northern Italy, and the trials of war criminals such as Pietro Caruso, the Fascist head of the Italian police. A film such as this is cumulative; we get a look at […]
Writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’homme qui ment—essential viewing, this—begins in a wooded expanse as a youngish man, nicely dressed, pursued by armed soldiers, ducks behind trees to avoid their bullets and, despite the cascades of bullets aimed at him, escapes uninjured: a fantastical (and visually gorgeous) opening that visually translates this man’s propensity for telling whoppers. […]
Dazzlingly made by Emir Kusturíca (best director, Cannes), Dom za vešanje (which is in Serbian)—literally, Home for Hanging—is a gripping, engrossing Yugoslavian melodrama about Perhan, who descends into petty crime to pay for his crippled sister’s hospital care and for the house he wants built for himself and his grandmother. It is also a colorful, […]
Dennis Grunes 