The film isn’t so much about the moral atrophy of people who refuse to come to terms with their past as it is about cosmic karma passed from fathers to sons like an ancient curse.
The decentralized narrative benefits from the film’s original conception as a miniseries, with plenty of time to draw us into the morass that was the communist state.
Catherine Breillat’s scripting of Isabelle Huppert’s Maud as fatally distant from her family, willfully independent, but more believably abandoned, is haunting.
Maciej Cuske creates in Old Bookstore a peripheral microcosm, cherishing oddities and withdrawing judgment.
Claude Lanzmann’s film doesn’t so much strive to elucidate the Shoah as to draw us into its infinite moral complexities.
The documentary’s lack of a cohesive thesis may frustrate at times, but its power lies in its exposition of the mundane.
Most problematic is the way in which the Vietnamese are romanticized, as if they had not fought for their livelihoods and land, visceral and specific, but for ideals alone.
Piñeiro’s movies function like cinematic tapestries: sudden character changes are treated with brisk disregard, as characters and threads pile up; lines from literary works, read out loud, punctuate the action.
Wojciech Smarzowski’s Rose is at times so brutal that its more tender touches can startle.
The “unmasking” reveals less than the mask.
My Name Is Ki is haunted, albeit indirectly, by Agnieszka Holland’s fierce and brilliant A Single Woman.
The two life choices that Bergman entertains are frightening.
The Themersons have been compared to artists László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray.
The film’s darkness resists any glossing over of what isn’t only France’s, but Europe’s painful legacy.
As an artistic peripeteia, Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
The filmmaker’s latest creates an aura of intrigue, mostly from documentary footage aided by an ominous voiceover.
The director’s cut of The Tin Drum doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.
Maya Deren’s passion for movement was so great that her friends remarked she could have been a dancer.
Czech New Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s late-’60s gem is a wicked sex farce whose overall effect is kaleidoscopic.
If there’s one thing that’s genuinely surprising about Philippe Garrel’s new film it’s the lack of feverish urgency that its title promises.