(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) “Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.” Last Days is a religious film. A loosely fictional account of the days leading up to the suicide of the lead singer of an internationally famous grunge band, it is an extended meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain. […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) L’Intrus opens on a French/Swiss border crossing, a regulated point through which foreign people and objects are allowed to enter at some amount of risk. In the first act of L’Intrus we do catch glimpses of illegal immigrants and goods making their way through the forest near this checkpoint, perhaps […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) For most who watch this film for the first time, the most memorable moment will probably be when Nana cries in the theatre with Dreyer’s Joan of Arc during a screening of The Passion of Joan of Arc. David Bordwell said somewhere that “the real problem” with the […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) This film, renamed A Grin Without a Cat for English audiences, was completed in 1977 but re-edited in 1992 (most in the know say that these edits are “slight”). It would be as possible to give a brief synopsis of its narrative as it would be to describe the […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) This is one of the more surprising turn of events in New Wave history. Here is a director that many mistakenly considered, and still consider, to be a minor director. Over the opening credits stands an overhead shot of an anonymous square with rain falling straight down around the […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) It is hard for Russian directors to escape comparison to Tarkovsky and his spiritual hybrids of form and substance. Newcomer Andrei Zvyagintsev is no exception to this rule for the most part. But there may be enough of a nuance to his latest film, The Return, that finally […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) For some reason I never got around to a full-length review of Dogville. The film generated so many rabbit trails and hit so remarkably close to home on a number of points I thought I would spare any readers the agony of wading through my muddled thoughts […]
(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.) It is a scientific fact, at least according to a recent issue of Reader’s Digest, that the part of your brain that makes decisions is much faster than the part of your brain that creates emotions. A human being can encounter a problem and make a decision […]
Friday Night had such a limited theatrical release that a recent DVD release merits discussing it. Well, that and the fact that it simply is a film worth talking about that didn’t get talked about very much. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Emmanuele Bernheim (who also has written the recent scriptsSwimming Pool and Under […]