Cameraperson

After four consecutive “masterpieces,” what did the Dardenne brothers do? Make another movie every bit as good as those. Like La Promesse, Rosetta, and The Son, The Child (L’Enfant) is a subtle parable about tests of conscience and character in a punishing world. We’re introduced to Bruno (the extraordinary Jérémie Renier). He’s young, but he’s already a hardened criminal….

We must decide to be human. In the People’s Square, before a great crowd of witnesses and in representing them, we must make the decision to be wholly human. Wim Wenders’ wonderful and dreamlike 1987 fantasy, Der Himmel über Berlin, portrays two angels observing the people of a divided Berlin.   As the camera floats freely…

A stuttering student is hypnotized to cure his impediment. A strong wind blows across a field. A ceiling collapses in a rainshower. A bird lands on a boy’s head. A sleeping woman levitates over her bed. A man clutches some feathers in his hand, and a bird flies out.   It is difficult to imagine…

“You gotta laugh, ain’t ya sweetheart? Else you’d cry.” This observation from working-class Londoner Cynthia Rose Purley (Brenda Blethyn) is a perfect summary of the tone running through Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning melodramatic masterpiece. A slice-of-life portrayal of broken individuals navigating the complexity of their familial ties, Secrets & Lies perfectly captures the quiet intensity of ordinary suffering. Both comic…

A sensitive cultural ethnography of the exotic, much-maligned world of Southern Pentecostalism; a complex study of a character whose many contradictions startlingly combine sacred and profane dimensions; a spiritual exploration of the inscrutable workings of guilt and grace: The Apostle—long labored over by writer, director, producer, and star Robert Duvall—is all of these.   Duvall’s film contemplates…

In approximately a decade’s time, if not slightly longer, Nicholas Ray directed a corpus of artistically successful films comparable to William Wyler’s run of exceptional movies in the 1940s and 1950s, to Yasujiro Ozu’s mature work from 1949 to 1962, and to Jean-Luc Godard’s cinematic experiments in the 1960s. Like Godard (who was deeply influenced…