The Second World War, and especially the role of ordinary French civilians in resisting Nazi occupation, would repeatedly inspire René Clément, a journeyman director whose travels often took him onto the front lines of anti-fascist action. World War II or its immediate aftermath would inform his best early works (Battle of the Rails, Forbidden Games, The Walls of Malapaga) as … [Read more...]
‘Maps and Legends’: Author chronicles life of seminal indie band R.E.M.
In a storied irony, the band that achieved its highest-charting single with “Losing My Religion” would begin its wobbly launch toward rock superstardom in a church in Athens, Georgia. It was April 5, 1980, at a private birthday party in the city’s former St. Mary’s Episcopal, where 50 people were expected to turn out. Five hundred showed up, standing shoulder to shoulder in … [Read more...]
‘Shortcomings’: Film’s too-clever world misses chance to say something truly memorable
The best compliment I can pay to Randall Park’s Shortcomings is that I would have loved this movie in college. The 20-year-old me would have appreciated the lovesick angst of its central character, an Asian-American film-school dropout named Ben (Justin H. Min) who works at a struggling Berkeley art-house cinema and binges Criterion DVDs at night while trying to reconcile the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Revel in the enduring 3-D schlock of ‘Robot Monster’
3-D movies, the most stubborn fad in cinema, turned 100 last year. Twenty twenty-two marked the centenary of the unremembered 1922 film The Power of Love, released with dual-strip projection and those familiar anaglyph glasses to a presumably gobsmacked audience of Los Angelenos. The technology has, of course, continued to evolve amid peaks and valleys in its popularity. … [Read more...]
‘Past Lives’: A beautiful, nuanced look at being in the present, and the past
In writer-director Celine Song’s tender triptych Past Lives, set during three segments 12 years apart, time is a wily and unpredictable mistress. Sometimes it goes by in a blip: a simple cut and some onscreen text informing us, in the eternal present tense, “12 years pass.” Then, when the two protagonists, childhood friends finally uniting in adulthood, see one another for … [Read more...]
‘Asteroid City’: Anderson’s newest monument to artifice is his most authentic
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Asteroid City is that it actually exists. For the bean counters who fund the movies, eccentricity and experimentation are rarely inspiring motivators to open wallets, as evidenced by the Sisyphean career of Terry Gilliam. But somehow, even though his projects have by no means been consistently successful, Wes Anderson has managed to crack … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A radiant twosome: Coming of age in occupied France, making movies for the sightless
Sometimes, the theme for a View From Home column derives not from a think piece or deep connection on my part but simply from the arbitrary vicissitudes of a distributor’s release schedule. So it was that in my mailbox, within days of each other, I received two foreign-language DVDs from Film Movement that begged to be reviewed together. A Radiant Girl ($20.44) and Radiance … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The bonkers, sex-positive feminism of Imamura’s last film
Still crazy after all these years, Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge premiered in 2001 and would prove to be the Japanese auteur’s final film. Imamura’s oeuvre had spanned 17 features by this point, to say nothing of his television documentaries, but Warm Water is perhaps best appreciated as its own wild animal, divorced from the lurid underworld dramas on which … [Read more...]
‘You Hurt My Feelings’: A comedy of creatives with a profound message
So you married an artist. It may be the absolute perfect union of love and companionship. But what happens when you genuinely don’t like your other half’s work? That’s the pivotal question in Nicole Holofcener’s unassumingly profound seventh feature You Hurt My Feelings, the latest of her piercing comedies about stuck New York creatives. But it’s not the only question in … [Read more...]
‘Wings of Desire’: Wenders’s masterpiece, newly restored, is a humanist monument
Even when New German Cinema maestro Wim Wenders isn’t making literal road movies, his most personal films feel like they’re always on the go, destination unknown. An intuitive filmmaker seemingly driven more by whims and tides and implacable emotions and songs he likes than by the rigid dictates of a script, Wenders’s shambolic approach has yielded its share of masterpieces … [Read more...]