Clive’s Drama precious thing about Christie is that she’ll give a wholly coherent narrative with some unresolved bits — a narrative if you will where we actually accomplish some of the things we do in absorbing a narrative. Then at the end of essentially all...
Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.
Discontinuous experiments in this film, and I took some trouble in sorting them out. The first thing you'll notice is the discontinuous camerawork, accentuated by low (never high) angles and strobeflashframes. This element by itself is sophomoric filmschoolism. Then you have the plot tags and storyline. The...
When cocky military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee and his co-counsel, Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway, are assigned to a murder case, they uncover a hazing ritual that could implicate high-ranking officials such as shady Col. Nathan Jessep.
Rosencrantz and Guidenstern writing this in 2025 more than 30 years after seeing it, and probably 25 since writing the first IMDB comment, alas now deleted because of some complaint to IMDB. Watching it now, the whole context has changed. I know quite a few unbalanced...
Set during Japan's Shogun era, this film looks at life in a samurai compound where young warriors are trained in swordfighting. A number of interpersonal conflicts are brewing in the training room, all centering around a handsome young samurai named Sozaburo Kano. The school's stern master can choose to intervene, or to let Kano decide his own path.
Beautiful Face of the Senses" was an insidiously effective film: it tricked us into an obsession over sex with its frank and open explicitness. Thus, we became part of the story about sexual obsession. This does something similar, in a masterpiece of sorts in audience manipulation....
A footman seduces a count's daughter. Adaptation of August Strindberg's famous play.
A Man and his Mistress what love does, when yearning crosses boundaries and makes someone see another as better than they really are. Here, it ends in suicide. I'm talking about Mike Figgis' view of girlfriend Saffron. A reliably trenchant play: a competent footman; a very...
Before they can complete renovations on their new inn, a father and daughter are visited by a woman seeking immediate lodging for her strange group of travelers.
Genre Baseball of the joys I find in film, is the ability to see a movie the way I want instead of the way the market prefers. Because the market likes to sell discrete things, it sustains a metanarrative that you buy one experience at...
Set halfway through the 17th century, a church play is performed for the benefit of the young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selling blessings from the baby, and even claiming she's the true mother by virgin birth. However, when she attempts to seduce the bishop's son, the Church exacts a terrible revenge.
Tapestry of Self-reference art to be real, worthwhile, it has to be more than a mere political statement. It has to be ‘open,' producing rewards beyond what the artist might have had in mind. Greenaway is the richest artist working in film and this film...
Following the death of a mother, a father and son open up their very own harem in their Genevan estate after watching 8½.
Women: Types and Missteps master visual allegorist reaches farther and fails. But not for the reasons others claim here. Greenaway has never centred his films in the narrative — we'd always be frustrated to look for satisfaction there. (‘Drowning' which among his works most delivers...
Smilla Jaspersen, half Danish, half Greenlander, attempts to understand the death of a small boy who falls from the roof of her apartment building. Suspecting wrongdoing, Smilla uncovers a trail of clues leading towards a secretive corporation that has made several mysterious expeditions to Greenland. Scenes from the film were shot in Copenhagen and western Greenland. The film was entered into the 47th Berlin International Film Festival, where director Bille August was nominated for the Golden Bear.
Snow Job is a replacement comment, the original having been removed because of a complaint. One of the reasons for leaving IMDB and setting up this site is because possibly over a thousand of my comments were lost because some fundamentalist warrior took it on...
The Limey follows Wilson, a tough English ex-con who travels to Los Angeles to avenge his daughter's death. Upon arrival, Wilson goes to task battling Valentine and an army of L.A.'s toughest criminals, hoping to find clues and piece together what happened. After surviving a near-death beating, getting thrown from a building and being chased down a dangerous mountain road, the Englishman decides to dole out some bodily harm of his own.
Proustian Out and Back deserves respect, as much for his failures (‘Brokovich,’’Traffic') as his successes (this, ‘Sight,’’Videotape'). When he experiments, it is with simultaneous layers of different kinds involving the eye, the mind, time, remembrance. Here he works on small, intimate layers, small visions of the...
