Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky. Starring Aleksandr Kaidanovsky, Anatoli Solonitsyn, Nikolai Grinko Watching Stalker, I felt as if my knowledge of how movies worked had been made irrelevant. The way the camera moves in with the most measured slowness on its target, so slowly that you hardly recognize it’s happening until it’s happened. The sudden appearances of… Read More Stalker (1979)
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson (My thoughts on the previous episode are here.) “I came here to tell you something. I’ve gone and fallen in love. It’s absurd, and probably a big mistake. Most probably a big mistake.” At the end of this episode, Johan is packing up for a trip to… Read More Scenes from a Marriage S1E3, “Paula”
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Gunnel Lindblom (My thoughts on the previous episode are here.) Of the six episodes of this miniseries, “The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug” is the shortest by a good ten minutes. Once again, despite giving us some time with Johan and Marianne in the early… Read More Scenes from a Marriage S1E2, “The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug”
Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Bibi Andersson Johan (Josephson) and Marianne (Ullmann) are hosting a pair of old friends for dinner. Peter (Jan Malmsjo) and Katarina (Andersson) belong very much to the same social stratum as our heroes. Johan is a professor and Marianne a lawyer specializing in family law, which boils… Read More Scenes from a Marriage S1E1, “Innocence and Panic”
Dir. Gabriel Axel. Starring Birgitte Federspiel, Bodil Kjer, Jarl Kulle Watch enough celebrity chefs and listen to them talk, and one of the common themes they always come back to is the belief in food done “simply.” Simplicity is a devilishly tricky noun, one that, given some of the dishes we see coming out of… Read More Babette’s Feast (1987)
Dir. Mathieu Kassovitz. Starring Vincent Cassel, Hubert Kounde, Said Taghmaoui An old man pops out of a bathroom stall after Vinz (Cassel), Hubert (Kounde), and Said (Taghmaoui) have been having a fairly incriminating conversation. All of their conversations, to be fair, are incriminating in one way or another, but in this one they reference Vinz’s… Read More La haine (1995)
Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore. Starring Jacques Perrin, Philippe Noiret, Marco Leonardi Cinema Paradiso is in many respects kind of a bad movie. It has a problem with its ending, which is not really its own ending so much as an ending pieced together from the endings of a great many other films. Depending on your point… Read More Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Dir. Edward Yang. Starring Wu Nien-jen, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang There are few topics which are as generally repulsive as “person searches for meaning.” Look, here’s a Google search I did on the idea, and while not every option is bad, it ain’t a promising list: Yi Yi is full of characters who jump at… Read More Yi Yi (2000)
Dir. George Miller. Starring Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, Nicholas Hoult When the Fury Road fever was at its highest – I remember laying in bed, sweating through my pajamas with a temperature of 104, intermittently shrieking, “I live, I die, I live again!” – there was a fair bit of talk about how the movie… Read More Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Dir. Dario Argento. Starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Alida Valli Suspiria is what you’d get if Michael Powell and John Carpenter were forced to do a movie together, combining stunning color with marvelously eerie settings. Like the best of Powell’s work, a good but somewhat outmatched woman is at the center of the movie; like… Read More Suspiria (1977)
Seeing Things Secondhand 