The first film in Kieślowski’s “Colors Trilogy” centers around a French woman Julie (Juliette Binoche in her defining role), who has lost her husband and son in a car accident. Shattered and numb, Julie quietly rages in post-traumatic stress via total seclusion, cutting herself off Read More …
Taking its title from an Alexander Pope poem, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind combines the DIY exuberance of director Michel Gondry and the existential hyperactivity of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman in a film that is, technically, about brain damage. Following a painful breakup with his girlfriend Clementine Read More …
Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries mixes intimate drama with expressionistic dream sequences, a road trip format with a trip down memory lane. As aging Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) travels to be awarded an honor for his life’s work, he is confronted by both travelers and memories of Read More …
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo remains one of the great films about memory’s dangerous allure. Its spiral-shaped narrative concerns detective Scottie Ferguson, who, haunted by a series of failures, makes an idol of memory and becomes imprisoned by the past. His dark obsession gives birth to one of cinema’s Read More …
Haunted by memories of World War II, specifically the Hiroshima bombings, a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) also dwell upon the memories of their now ended affair. Director Alain Resnais repeatedly cuts to the same scenes, ingrained in both their Read More …
There are three sides to every story, the saying goes: yours, mine and the truth. But in Akira Kurosawa’s first international hit, there are at least four sides – that of a bandit, the woman he may have raped, the husband he may have murdered, Read More …
The poet Denise Levertov proposed that the world might know peace if we reorganized priorities in favour of ‘long pauses’. She was calling for a practice of deep imagination. The final movie from master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami feels like a profound example. In it, Kiarostami Read More …
Andrew Bujalski’s affecting Support the Girls is one of the more raw, honest, and insightful cinematic depictions of the American food industry and its underlying ideologies. The story centers on a day in the life of restaurant manager Lisa (Regina Hall) as she tries to manage and Read More …
One of the year’s wildest and weirdest films is also the most intensely theological. Bruno Dumont’s musical about the young Joan of Arc features an eclectic score by Igorrr, but every lyric and line of dialogue is drawn from the writings of the French Catholic Read More …
Bing Liu’s intimate documentary initially seems like little more than a celebration of the simple joys of skateboarding while being young and carefree, a family drama of two young twenty-somethings raising a child together, and the struggle to make a living in a small city, Read More …