Dir. Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Christelle Cornil Arguably the greatest moment in one of the greatest movies ever made, Three Colors: Blue, comes when Juliette Binoche sees the baby mice in her apartment and knows that she’s supposed to exterminate them. A woman grieving is given the responsibility to… Read More Two Days, One Night (2014)
Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Starring Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam Spoilers below, for a movie that, even in the mind of a “spoilers are meaningless” reviewer, kind of works better without knowing anything. In August 1914, a servant killed seven people: one was the mistress of the house, two were her children, and the other… Read More Parasite (2019)
Dir. Max Ophuls. Starring Anton Walbrook, Simone Signoret, Odette Joyeux Dir. Michael Haneke. Starring Juliette Binoche, Luminita Gheorghiu, Thierry Nevec In the early days of this blog’s reboot, one of the problems I found myself grappling with was the trouble that comes from adapting a play into a movie. The trouble is with the similarities… Read More La ronde (1950) and Code Unknown (2000)
Dir. Erich von Stroheim. Starring Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt Watching a movie like Greed—a movie I frankly lucked into catching on TCM before it left the channel—is enough to give someone an existential crisis about today’s movies. (Everything I am about to say has been said before. Forgive me, and lament with me.) Watch… Read More Greed (1924)
Dir. Grigori Chukhrai. Starring Vladimir Ivashov, Zhanna Prokhorenko, Aleksandr Kuznetsov This is a short movie, less than ninety minutes from tip to tail, and what’s incredible about is that for, I dunno, eighty-two of those minutes I never would have dreamed that this was a movie about cruelty. Alyosha (Ivashov) is on his way back… Read More Ballad of a Soldier (1959)
Dir. Aki Kaurismaki. Starring Matti Pellonpaa and a whole bunch of guys with equally Finnish names There are more brilliant gags in Leningrad Cowboys Go America than this one, but the moment I knew I was watching the funniest thing in the entire world comes about halfway through. The band is all in the car,… Read More Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Starring Setsuko Hara, Chishu Ryu, Haruko Sugimura The Abilene paradox posits that in a group of people, it is entirely possible that a group of people can collectively engage in an activity even though all of them hold some reservations about so doing. The original example features four people who decide to… Read More Late Spring (1949)
Dir. Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Christian Barbier Melville, whose track record with the French Resistance had a great influence on his future filmmaking career (not least of which was his name, a nom de guerre from the guerre itself), frequently begins his films with epigraphs. Not all of them work for me—looking… Read More Army of Shadows (1969)
Dir. Pawel Pawlikowski. Starring Agata Trzebuchowska, Agata Kulesza, Dawid Ogrodnik In a black-and-white film, throwaway comments about eye or hair color are distracting at best, like little asides to the audience whispering that yes, She is pretty. In practice they recall Sonya’s lament of the fate of ugly women: “When a woman is ugly, people say… Read More Ida (2013)
Dir. Krzystof Kieslowski. Starring Juliette Binoche, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Irene Jacob Not since I wrote about Persona about eighteen months ago have I felt so reluctant to commit to what I think about a movie (or, indeed, three of them). Kieslowski died in 1996 and never lived to see the new millennium or the way the… Read More Three Colors Trilogy: Blue (1993), White (1994), Red (1994)
Seeing Things Secondhand 