The Strange Case of Angelica, dir. Manoel de Oliveira Sleeping Beauty, dir. Catherine Breillat On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for a film.  What could be more static than a princess asleep for a hundred years?  It’s the kind of premise only Andy Warhol could cope ... read more »

Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michelangelo Frammartino Cold Weather, dir. Aaron Katz All of a sudden, reincarnation has become a major subject in contemporary film.  In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul followed his title character’s soul in its movements between the animal and human worlds over a thousand years of Thai ... read more »

Biutiful, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu Enter the Void, dir. Gaspar Noé Cities are hard to pin down on film.  For decades, hardly anyone bothered to try.  Usually they’re just scenery, static backdrops in which the action unfolds, but at times, they come into bright focus – Paris in the sixties, New York in the seventies, ... read more »

Warsaw/Chicago Film Diary 1. Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky The perils of virginity, or I Was a Teenage Were-Swan. Black Swan is a hot mess: preposterous if you listen to the words, luridly enjoyable while you’re watching the screen, and unexpectedly complex, almost pop-profound, by the time you get home.  The most surprising thing about it ... read more »

Des Hommes et des Dieux, dir. Xavier Beauvois On the night of March 26, 1996, seven Trappist monks were abducted from the Monastery of Tibhirine in Algeria by members of the Armed Islamic Group, a radical Islamist movement fighting to overthrow the Algerian government.  Two months later their decapitated heads were discovered on a road ... read more »

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a lush and laid-back drama about death and reincarnation.  It’s several other things as well, depending on where you look.  Take one ... read more »

Warsaw Film Festival Highlights (plus a few stray thoughts) 1) We Are What We Are – dir. Jorge Michel Grau, Mexico The set-up could come out of an old neorealist drama: a family with three kids in a decaying house on the outskirts of Mexico City.  Dad, a watch repairman, has just fallen dead in ... read more »

This is apropos the DVD release of Lost Season 6: A lot of people were disappointed with the series finale of Lost, disappointed to the point they felt it betrayed everything they loved about the show.  Big, crucial, origin-of-the-world mysteries we had been wondering about for six years went unsolved.  A whole separate universe introduced ... read more »

Dishonored Dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1931 Marlene Dietrich and Mata Hari: it sounds so obvious once you say it.  It didn’t take long for Josef von Sternberg, to put the two together.  But first he had to settle on the right Mata Hari.  A mere fourteen years after her death, the details of her life ... read more »

I recently got back from a few days at the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocław.  When I was there, most of the excitement centered on Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men, and most of the bafflement concerned Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers.  I didn’t arrive in time to see either film, but I did ... read more »