The polarizing result of the collaboration between French New Wave pioneer Resnais and famed “New Novelist” Alain Robbe-Grillet, this is a film that challenges at every turn and is guaranteed to thrill some with itsContinue reading
Category: International Coproduction
Waltz With Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
Folman’s unique mixing of documentary aesthetics with cutting-edge Flash and traditional forms of animation creates the perfect medium to convey the slippery edges between past and present, real and imagined, dreamed and remembered. While powerfullyContinue reading
Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)
How to follow up one of the most scandalous art-house hits of all time? If you’re Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima, you do more of the same, but different. His followup to In the Realm ofContinue reading
In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976)
Defenders of Oshima’s sexually explicit depiction of an obsessive relationship argue that it is a pure, uncomplicated, and therefore challenging depiction of love fully unleashed from social conformity and moral complications. The problem is thatContinue reading
The Damned (Luchino Visconti, 1969)
A far cry from his neorealist roots, Visconti goes for broke in this extraordinary epic of high camp. History is thrown beneath the steady flow of Freudian pathology, sexual perversity, soap opera theatrics, and SirkianContinue reading
The International (Tom Tykwer, 2009)
If last week’s Friday the 13th remake/reboot/whatever-it-was welcomed us back to the ’80s, Tykwer’s corporate-evil thriller is yet another welcome back to the ’70s, with its stylish, yet paranoid vision of international banking as aContinue reading
The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008)
This film about a young man discovering that the older woman with whom he had an idyllic affair was possibly a Nazi war criminal reunites director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, who last collaboratedContinue reading
Europa (Lars von Trier, 1991)
With its optical mixing of black-and-white and jarring instances of color set against the bombed out desolation of postwar Germany, von Trier’s third feature is nothing less than a visual masterpiece. However, for all itsContinue reading
Yor, the Hunter From the Future (Antonio Margheriti, 1983)
I vaguely remember catching bits of this on HBO as a kid, and time has not been kind to its mash-up of prehistoric silliness and sci-fi nonsense. Veteran schlock director Antonio Margheriti (aka Anthony M.Continue reading
MirrorMask (Dave McKean, 2005)
There is a dazzling display of imagination in virtually every frame of this weird fantasy adventure, but what it really needs is someone to draw it all together. The last of the opening credits notes thatContinue reading