Romantic comedy about a group of Britons flying to Paris for the weekend.
deGaulled After the war, France was a mess — an agricultural economy with a bad reputation world-wide because of near universal collaboration with the Nazis. America resolved to rebuild Europe and part of the plan was to cast Paris as a romantic place. The instruction went...
Invisible forces exert power over us in our sleep. A mercenary named Ink, on a literal nightmare mission, captures the spirit of 8-year-old Emma in the dream world. To save her, the dream-givers marshal all their resources, focusing on saving the soul of Emma's tragically broken father.
Paper on Ink Gosh, is this good cinema. It has energy and imagination. It has internal self-reference: the storyteller in the thing has her audience as one of the characters, someone who appears in three persona unknown to each other. The way things are revealed and...
Mike is a lonely Australian boy living in a coastal wilderness with his reclusive father. In search of friendship he encounters an Aboriginal native loner and the two form a bond in the care of orphaned pelicans.
Internal Weather I’ve had the advantage of being old, and living in both the US and Australia and raising kids in each. That gives me a perspective on the book before seeing the film. Every so often, a young adult book hits a sweet spot in...
After a 7 year wait, director Michael Apted revisits the same group of British-born children from Seven Up! The subjects are interviewed as to the changes that have occurred in their lives during the last seven years.
We Discover The way I think of films is that every film is first about other films and incidentally about life. In referencing or extending our film experience — and at the same time providing tools for folding that experience into life — movies give us...
Matt, a young glaciologist, soars across the vast, silent, icebound immensities of the South Pole as he recalls his love affair with Lisa. They meet at a mobbed rock concert in a vast music hall - London's Brixton Academy. They are in bed at night's end. Together, over a period of several months, they pursue a mutual sexual passion whose inevitable stages unfold in counterpoint to nine live-concert songs.
Rock and Roll When I saw Scorsese’s “Last Waltz”, I thought that I would never again see a concert film as true. And I haven’t, until now. The Band were the last popular musicians to tell stories, have nearly all those stories be in the third person...
A well known Parisian inspector becomes involved in an investigation while on holiday.
Mystery Man I was never a champion of Chabrol, but I am amazed at what he left as his last film. The film is superficially framed as a detective story but as it progresses it slowly turns inside out as it becomes a discovery about the...
Mid-level gangster Wah falls in love with his beautiful cousin, but must also continue to protect his volatile partner-in-crime and friend, Fly.
Streets of Mean No better one day film school can be found in watching “Mean Streets” and then this. Superficially they seem the same and Kar-Wai has told us that he patterned this, his first feature after Scorsese’s first. Here’s the lesson: Scorsese belongs to a school of...
Nigel Spivey reveals how the images which surround us today come from the ancient world. It's an epic journey spanning five continents and a hundred thousand years of history.
The Skull in the Livingroom Here is a strange idea for a documentary. Make a movie about why movies work, why we cling to them and how they invent our humanity. Tell a story about storytelling. It is put together by a man who himself is a good...
Two freethinking teenagers - a boy and a girl - confront with authoritarian teachers in their boarding schools. The other students treat this differently.
A Caning for Love Heavens be thanked for how Australians and New Zealanders have revived the acting element of film. Everything in the country seems set up to produce performing artists, even talent writers that understand acting, where Brazil produces soccer players and the US lawyers. Here...
An egocentric bum transforms the lives of a shy New Jersey garbageman and his sister.
We See The Poem Hartley is a major talent, a unique, competent voice in a bramble of sameness. The last project I saw was “No Such Thing,” which is one of those that if you don’t actively avoid it, it hits you deep in your soul...
