Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Toward the end of Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, an elusive double-agent, who’s betrayed British state secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years, defends his decision to have done so on aesthetic grounds. And you can hardly blame the bloke, considering the portrait of early-’70s London that [...]
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Thursday, December 8th, 2011
The Artist
People speak of The Artist as if its being a black-and-white silent film were a liability. As if the Weinsteins were taking a risk tantamount to installing hand cranks in the whole bevy of new Beamers. But that assumes that The Artist is an audacious work of art, and not the screen equivalent of the [...]
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Sunday, October 9th, 2011
My Joy
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But Sergei Loznitsa’s joy is, well, My Joy—even if its own jollity is purely titular. A swinish-looking man, sweat draining down the flaps of his ushanka, smiles nervously as he expounds his philosophy of life—mind-your-own-business non-interference—to a captive audience comprising a solitary, steely-eyed hitcher. Amidst this [...]
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Thursday, April 14th, 2011
Certified Copy
In the opening scene of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, an esteemed English essayist named Miller (William Shimell) arrives fashionably late to a speaking engagement at a modest literary society in Tuscany. Behind the dais, he apologizes for his tardiness with a variation of the same lame jest that the man who introduced him had made [...]
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Thursday, March 24th, 2011
Vision
I was going batty trying to figure out who the star of Vision, Barbara Sukowa, reminded me of—and then, like a godsmack, it hit me: Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. This is an odd affinity, considering that Sukowa is playing Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th-century Rhenish abbess whose resurgence has made strange bedfellows of Catholic, [...]