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The best of the year in cinema
On this, the final day of the year, I offer my personal top ten of the best in cinema.1.Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, Sundance). Reviewed here.2.Après mai (Olivier Assayas, Toronto 2012)....
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I'm Not There
The first time I saw the Coen Brothers' film Inside Llewyn Davis at Cannes, I was struck by the virtuosity of the imagery and the plaintive sadness of the story without being entirely convinced the...
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Foreign country
With his first film in the West, the extremely gifted Asghar Farhadi draws on the very themes of the stranger, layering cultural dislocation and social estrangement in fashioning an alternately...
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Sundance: All in
The Berlinale is at the halfway mark, but I am still thinking about Sundance (illness and other personal factors prevented this piece from arriving earlier). This year's edition, my twenty-third foray...
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Cries and whispers
The extraordinary Ida, mournful and devastating, is the new work and the first in Polish, by the filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski. He was born, in Warsaw, grew up in England, and has long been drawn to...
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Moving pictures
Most of my Cannes pieces this year originated at Doug Cummings’ superb Los Angeles-based site, www.filmjourney.org.I have been extremely fortunate to attend every festival except one in the last...
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Tender loyalties
Kelly Reichardt is one of my favorite American directors. She makes beautiful, intelligent and glancing movies that are almost impossible to predict. Those are, obviously admirable and viable...
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The Rapture
The third feature by the London-born filmmaker Jonathan Glazer, Under the Skin is a work of exacting strangeness. Like Gravity, the movie testifies to the power and hypnotic wonder of image and sound....
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Sound and fury
Is Michael Bay the anti-Christ, a pop visionary, or a filmmaker for our devalued times. I am the first to admit his cinema is not mine. Personally, I find Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and Bad Boys II much...
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Age of innocence
I love the narrator’s direct, sensuous reaction to the first time he spies Swann’s daughter Gilberte in the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Suddenly I stood still, unable to...
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