Dir. Bille August. Starring Samuel Froler, Pernilla August, Ghita Norby I wonder what it says that the movie I would give to someone who had never come across a Bergman movie before would be to give them an August movie. The Best Intentions gives us for the old master what Shelby Foote referred to as… Read More The Best Intentions (1992)
Dir. Eric Rohmer. Starring Barbet Schroeder, Michele Girardon, Claudine Soubrier Almost eight months to the day after I watched My Night at Maud’s, I finally finished Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales. By a weird set of circumstances, The Bakery Girl of Monceau is the last one I’ve added to my tally, and I’m not sure… Read More The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Julia Dufvenius, Liv Ullmann, Borje Ahlstedt Image links back here Music is a discipline too often taken for granted, I think; there’s a sense in the popular imagination that all musicians are either Mozart reborn, effortlessly cranking out the hits, or teetering on the edge of personal collapse à la Johnny… Read More Saraband (2003)
Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Starring Nazario Gerardi, Severino Pisacane, Esposito Bonaventura Federico Fellini worked with Rossellini on several of his movies as a writer. Whether or not one prefers his neorealist period to his baroque one is up for contention, but it’s a pleasure in either event to see the off-kilter characters who would populate his… Read More The Flowers of St. Francis (1950)
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. Rainer Sarnet. Starring Rea Lest, Jorgen Liik, Taavi Eelmaa In the Wild West, they had tumbleweeds rolling across the desert scrub. In the 19th Century Estonia of November, they have kratts clanking in front of a town’s single manor. Made of three scythes and a cow’s skull, one of these kratts makes its way… Read More November (2017)
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. Asghar Farhadi. Starring Shahab Hosseini, Taraneh Alidoosti, Farid Sajadhosseini Asghar Farhadi is a hypnotic talent. His movies have an undertow capable of sucking us in when we have surrendered ourselves too fully to the waves. Scenes first unfold realistically; a husband stays behind after a show to talk to a censor, and his wife… Read More The Salesman (2016)
Seeing Things Secondhand 