As in the source material, the beauty of the title of François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Music Box, $27.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD) is that it can refer to any number of its players. Surely there’s the mysterious protagonist, the emotionally inert Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), whose office job is as undefined as his first name, a hallmark of existentialist … [Read more...]
Film historian sees art form as enabler of fascism
Did the movies sleepwalk us into the elections of Donald Trump? This provocative question hides in plain sight throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, British film historian David Thomson’s unsettling and often downbeat new book, his 45th on the art form he loves — or, perhaps, loved until very recently. The obtrusive shadow of the 47th … [Read more...]
Wilde shines as director, actor in ‘The Invite’
Any couple considering attending a screening of Olivia Wilde’s racy new dramedy The Invite should be forewarned. For all of its effective humor and risqué dialogue, the film is a certifiable anti-date movie, part of a cinematic lineage of dyspeptic relationships that stretches back to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Scenes from a Marriage and Husbands and Wives. As in these … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The lost debut from a formative figure in the French New Wave
It gives me a small pleasure to recall that the French New Wave, one of the most important artistic movements in world cinema, began in a critical journal years before any of its alums would film their first features. Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol launched their careers as critics for Cahiers du Cinema, a film magazine launched in 1951. … [Read more...]
‘Disclosure Day’: Vital viewing, and not just for ET aficionados
Disclosure Day may be a more important movie than a successful one. This isn’t to say that Steven Spielberg’s latest dive into what ET enthusiasts refer to as “the phenomenon” is not, by and large, a successful work of both art and entertainment. It means that its cultural impact, which should be galvanizing and could be volcanic, far outweighs the typical barometers of … [Read more...]
The View From Home: An American indie auteur’s raw and controversial 16mm debut
For most audiences, writer-director Ira Sachs first landed on their radars with the 2005 independent drama Forty Shades of Blue. The film introduced the patient style, realistic approach to dialogue and nuanced treatment of adult relationships — gay and straight alike — that would resurface throughout a mostly unimpeachable filmography. Keep the Lights On, Love is Strange, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A revelatory box set explores an unsung Japanese auteur
The Criterion Collection, as any cinephile knows, casts a wide net, and us critics lucky enough to land on the distributor’s media radar are never short of options for review material. Last month saw the release of a dramatic staple of classic Hollywood (Gilda), an effervescent Ernst Lubitsch comedy (Trouble in Paradise), an acerbic religious satire much ahead of its time (The … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Classic import, innovative doc offer alternative approaches to crime cinema
Lino Ventura cuts a menacing figure in Claude Sautet’s Classe tous risques (Criterion, $31.96 Blu-ray, $23.96 DVD). Maintaining a detached exterior even when his measures grow increasingly desperate, his character, a gangster-on-the-lam named Abel Davos, keeps a stoic demeanor punctuated by fits of volcanic temper. Sentenced to death in his native France, he first appears as an … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Two women-directed films, 40 years apart, revel in the possibilities of belief
In the Talking Heads classic “Heaven,” David Byrne asserts, in the declarative tense of someone who’s been there, that “Heaven is a place / a place where nothing / nothing ever happens.” Depending on the receiver, this information is either a relief or a comedown — a paradise of blessed stillness or an eternity of boredom. In Byrne’s metaphor, heaven is a bar whose live band … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Japanese anti-actioner ‘Cloud’ a corrosive satire on the capitalist dream
As someone who dabbles in reselling myself — albeit of on-the-level vinyl records, not suspiciously cheap “designer” goods — the scenario outlined in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s latest film Cloud (Criterion Premieres, $23.96 Blu-ray, $19.96 DVD) is the stuff of nightmares. Ryosuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda), who initially works in a garment factory by day, entered the world of online … [Read more...]