Based on Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Sofia Coppola’s irreverent, sumptuously stylized, and audaciously freeform, if decidedly uneven adaptation of Fraser’s re-evaluative biography casts the controversial monarch in a more human, accessible, and contemporary light – not as an arrogant, out of touch queen who, as proof of the height of her insensitivity over […]
Similar to Boris Lehman’s essay film, Searching for My Birthplace, Richard Copans’s Racines (Roots) examines the nature of identity, migration, transplantation, and reconstructed history. A routine trip to the dentist provides the point of departure for the filmmaker, as they discuss implants as a way of recreating permanent teeth through artificial roots. For Copans, the […]
Assembled from found film culled from propaganda reels, public service announcements, and movie westerns and set against a percussive, industrial soundtrack by David Byrne and Brian Eno, Bruce Connor’s America Is Waiting is a terse, but potent statement on the Reagan-era reactionary culture of moral righteousness, military aggression, and Cold War paranoia. Juxtaposing images depicting […]
Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo is a refreshingly original and complexly taut film that operates on a multifaceted level that is, all at once: compelling, macabre, funny, tragic, and even romantic. From the opening sequence of a car navigating agilely through an endless snow covered road with a car in tow, the Coen brothers deftly […]
Purple Noon is a taut, intelligently written, and well crafted film about an amoral criminal. Tom Ripley (Alain Delon), commissioned to find and bring home an old school acquaintance named Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), the errant son of a wealthy San Francisco businessman, is quickly seduced by the lifestyle of the idle rich. Without independent […]
Forbidden Games is a simple, yet deeply affecting story about loss and the ravages of war. Filmed from the perspective of children, René Clément juxtaposes the innocence of youth with the insight of maturity. The result is a powerful and unrelenting film that operates on a purely visceral level – from the haunting theme to […]