A single apple to feed a family, passed among its members like contraband. The existential utility of a partially charged cellphone. A $200 bottle of water. The things they carry, and the things they leave behind—whether a suitcase of valuables or the elders too weak, too injured or too exhausted to continue the journey. These are the considerations of the Middle Eastern and … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Six in Paris’ an effective New Wave omnibus and travelogue
Like the more cumbersome New York Stories 24 years later, 1965’s Six in Paris, now on Blu-ray (Icarus Films, $25.52), is an anthology film whose central theme is its setting. Rightly believing that Paris is an “inexhaustible” subject for cinema, as he tells an interviewer in one of the Blu-ray’s extras, producer Barbet Schroeder enlisted six directors, mostly associated with … [Read more...]
‘Daddio’: Taxicab confessional a little too play-bound to take off
Even in an increasingly secular America, the faithless have their confessors — those strangers, all but unseen behind a divider, ready and willing to lend an ear, a note of empathy, perhaps even some advice, if not absolution. I’m speaking, of course, of the taxicab drivers: the chauffeurs of the urban jungle, the mobile therapists, the keepers of many secrets. At least … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Woody Allen’s icy but buoyant foreign-language debut
It would be tempting, in the current media narrative of Woody Allen’s now-tarnished career in the United States, to view his first foreign-language film as a necessary retreat. After all, the story goes, the guy can only shoot overseas because no American actors will agree to work with him anymore. Allen’s cancellation is regional, not global. Maybe there is some truth to … [Read more...]
‘The Fall Guy’: An elegy for moviemaking buried in a charming rom-com
The new Ryan Gosling vehicle The Fall Guy is, as stuntman-turned-director David Leitch has said, “a love letter” to the stunt industry. It’s a business model that can use some love. In the trades and on the picket lines in recent years, there has been much chatter of artificial intelligence replacing flesh-and-blood stunt performers with digital replicas. In this environment, … [Read more...]
Weird rumination on Sasquatch life is short, but too long
If you ask 10 Bigfoot enthusiasts what the apocryphal creature is, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The latest and trendiest explanations are the most mystical, bolstered by advances in quantum theory. Bigfoot, so say the most far-out cyptozoologists, is an interdimensional being, a hologram essentially, that can phase in and out of our reality as effortlessly as Star … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Robert Altman’s elegiac parable of early-stage capitalism
So much has been written in the past 50 years about McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s status as an anti-Western that its subversive take on the great American genre now seems like an afterthought. After all, Robert Altman’s restless sense of reinvention — his dismantling of the Western’s dusty romance, weathered machismo and propulsive action — is far easier to accept in the postmodern, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Jean-Luc Godard’s final film — and a celebration of his complicated legacy
Released a year after Jean-Luc Godard’s death at age 91 in September 2022, writer-director Cyril Leuthy’s 2022 documentary Godard Cinema (Kino, $29.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD) is an informative and engrossing endeavor to unravel the mysteries and contradictions behind the movies’ most disruptive trailblazer. Leuthy interviewed subjects from in and outside of Godard’s circle, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Two cross-cultural Asiatic adventures, new on Blu-ray
A few years before she directed a soon-to-be pop-culture touchstone in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Fran Rubel Kuzui helmed her debut feature Tokyo Pop, a charming picaresque that has languished largely in cult obscurity for 35 years. A 4K restoration, supported through the Jane Fonda Women Directors Fund, opened in New York City and Los Angeles this past August, and … [Read more...]
‘Farewell, Mr. Haffmann’: WWII drama sees the enemies within
“We’re not in danger … we’re French.” These are famous last words, perhaps, from one Hannah Haffmann (Anne Coesens), wife of a successful jeweler in Paris, toward the beginning of Farewell, Mr. Haffmann. It’s 1941 Paris, a year after the Third Reich seized France, and Hannah’s husband Joseph (Daniel Auteuil) can literally see the writing on the wall: a “Census” posted outside … [Read more...]