The Auteurs

October 24

With its quasi-documentary approach and complete lack of recognizable cast, Laurent Cantet’s The Class seemed an unlikely contender for the prestigious Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which coincidentally hadn’t seen a French film walk away with the top prize in twenty-one years. Yet the Sean Penn-led jury unanimously decided that this small, [...]

October 23

J. Hoberman once said that “to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures,” and that’s a fine assertion (and judgment) and all, but really it isn’t risking much. The same could obviously be said about Ozu, or Godard, or Hou Hsiao-hsien or any number of other canonically enshrined directors. [...]

Imagine that we are sitting in an ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind a door. In an instant the room we are sitting in is completely altered; everything in it has taken on another look; the light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is [...]

October 22

For Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1975).  Designed by Elzbieta Procka.

October 21

Naomi Kawase’s Nanayo had its premier at the BKKIFF. The bulk of her oeuvre sits in a similar gray area between feature and documentary, like many of the films in the festival (see Part I).  The festival put Nanayo in its own category, as its closing film—fudging the distinction—but the film is, in fact, more [...]

An unusual concoction, this 1963 Georges Franju picture, which goes about its business as if the nouvelle vague never existed, among other things. An homage to the 1915 Louis Feuillade serial about an almost super-powered crime fighter who nonetheless has a fairly arduous time bringing the main evildoes to justice (the defining paradox of such [...]

October 20

Above: The Convert. Documentaries and their cinema verité cousins were the strongest part of the Bangkok International Film Festival this year. The best documentaries about Thailand—and about Southeast Asian countries, in general—explore that country’s seamy political or social underside, so it was disappointing when a Japanese documentary about child prostitution in Thailand, Children in the Dark, [...]

October 17

Above: director Kiyoshi Kurosawa at the New York Film Festival. Photo credit: C. J. Contino. Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is on the verge of a major surge in his international visibility. Although his career as a filmmaker began in the 1980s, it was not until the J-horror wave of films in the mid-90s [...]

Above: Frames from Nathaniel Dorsky’s 2008 film, Sarabande. Nathaniel Dorsky’s 15-minute Sarabande starts at dawn and ends at dusk, and, as it took a second viewing to realize, alternates between nature and city image series a bit, perhaps, like songs might alternate melody (garden, flowers) with bridges and riffs (city). Nature would be the melody because [...]

October 16

Above: Juliette Binoche in the candlelit dreams of spirit and film. Photo credit: Abel Ferrara & Anthology Film Archives. Within the first fifteen minutes of Mary director Abel Ferrara has already folded five layers of reality onto one another. The film begins with Mary Magdalene (Juliette Binoche) entering the tomb of Jesus and finding [...]