Misc. Reviews

★★★★ 4/4 How does a filmmaker, pace Godard, go about making sense of an incomprehensible tragedy?  What should be his or her approach?  On the one extreme, we have countless examples of [...]

★★★½ 3.5/4 I’m wondering how many synonyms for the word “seedy” I’ll need to get through this review. Probably aren’t enough in the English language. If ever there’s been a film [...]

★★★★ 4/4 If Robert Bresson had ever made a film about drugs, it would likely have been as stark and austere as Christine, a 52-minute masterpiece created by Alan Clarke for BBC television.  [...]

★★★ 3/4 Part staid courtroom procedural, part trenchant exploration into the justifications of wartime brutality, Bruce Beresford’s 1980 drama Breaker Morant forgoes the usual [...]

★★★★ 4/4 Although poet-filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad and her landmark documentary short from 1962, The House Is Black, which helped pave the way for the Iranian new wave of the sixties and [...]

★★★★ 4/4   At one point during the remarkable train sequence late in the film—this elliptically poetic episode runs approximately nine minutes, considerably longer than what I had [...]

★★★½ 3.5/4 Co-adapted by Tanaka Sumie and Ide Toshirô—who, together or separately, collaborated with director Naruse Mikio on some of his finest films of the fifties and sixties—Late [...]

★★★★ 4/4 One thing you can say about the films of David Michôd—the guy certainly seems to believe in the benefits of strong alpha figures. Or, more accurately, in the detrimental effects [...]

★★★★ 4/4 A dark satire of fascism, police states, machismo, and kink, Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion stands as a forgotten classic of agitprop, a clever, confusing, [...]

★★★ 3/4 What Did the Lady Forget? (Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka) isn’t considered among Ozu Yasujirô’s greatest achievements but it is a richer film than what it appears on the [...]