Dir. Ema Ryan Yamazaki There are more than 350 Division I men’s basketball programs in the United States. The 68-team March Madness tournament remains one of the great unifiers of offices across the nation, as even casual observers get pushed into pools to submit their brackets. Its randomness is its calling card, and for three… Read More Koshien: Japan’s Field of Dreams (2019)
Dir. Satyajit Ray. Starring Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee, Haradhan Bandopadhyay For much of the movie (which translates in English as The Coward), it appears that Karuna (Mukherjee) is not a woman much given to second chances. Upon discovering that a woman he’d loved for eighteen months in his younger days is a married, a proper… Read More Kapurush (1965)
Dir. Agnès Varda. Starring Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer When Francois (Jean-Claude) is telling Therese (Claire) about how much more he feels thanks to his affair with Emilie (Boyer), how much his happiness has been amplified, how much greater his emotions are and how many more arms he can offer to embrace and feels embraced by,… Read More Le bonheur (1965)
Dir. Miguel Gomes. Starring Ana Moreira, Carloto Cotta, Teresa Madruga I was watching Thor: The Dark World with my wife the other night, and within fifteen minutes both of us were disengaged, disturbed by the literal and tonal brownness of the images on screen. The longer the movie went, the more it felt like it had taken… Read More Tabu (2012)
Dir. Masaki Kobayashi. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Rentaro Mikuni, Akira Ishihama I’m not usually a person who cares very much about spoilers, but I’ll grant that there are certain movies where it’s hard to imagine the first viewing being as good with information as it is without information. Recently, Parasite has become the standard-bearer for folks like me,… Read More Harakiri (1962)
Dir. Andrey Zyvagintsev. Starring Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov, Elena Lyadova “To understand all is to forgive all,” Tolstoy wrote, but Zyvagintsev seems to disagree. Elena is one of the boldest movies of the last decade because it is austerely antagonistic. One lane heads north, and on that highway there’s pity for the characters. Then there’s another lane… Read More Elena (2011)
Dir. Ladj Ly. Starring Damien Bonnard, Alexis Manenti, Djebril Zonga The circus is in town, and it is pissed off. The circus van, which had previously meandered around Montfermeil advertising the show, has changed its tune considerably. A slew of profanity seems to both precede and follow the vehicle, all of it in response to… Read More Les Misérables (2019)
Dir. Jennifer Kent. Starring Aisling Franciosi, Baykali Ganambarr, Sam Claflin The Nightingale contains the strongest rebuke of the silliness, the callowness, of violence for violence’s sake in the pictures. It is not a war movie, but it has what they say about war movies in mind: that no movie can truly be anti-war, because the… Read More The Nightingale (2018)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Barely a movie in the traditional sense, A Visitor from the Living has two flourishes which make it more than a taped interview. The first are some shots of Theresienstadt, very much in the style that Lanzmann had used in Shoah. The buildings in the contemporary present are seen while we hear the words of… Read More A Visitor from the Living (1997)
Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Zeva Postic edited Shoah, and it’s a heroic job. Not simply because there was so much to go through, and not simply because there was so much to finally get on the screen. It’s because she highlights the strands of Lanzmann’s inquiry so cleanly, an absolute necessity for a film with this one’s… Read More Shoah (1985)
Seeing Things Secondhand 