Reviews / DVD Reviews
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Daguerréotypes
The word daguerréotype comes from Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the first widely successful photographic process. In typical practice, filmmaker Agnès Varda refashioned the word as a clever designation for her friends and neighbors...
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In the City of Sylvia
José Luis Guerín’s In the City of Sylvia is a stirringly poetic conceit. The film is about a young artist chasing the memory of a lost love through the streets of Strasbourg. He watches...
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Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
I am aware that I have a tendency to eviscerate a film and then claim, somewhat paradoxically, that I didn’t hate it. This is a consequence of being at war with myself over the...
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Around A Small Mountain
Jacques Rivette’s Around A Small Mountain (36 Vues Du Pic Saint Loup) is an enigmatic riff about two strangers whose lives collide under the big top. It has been 15 years since the terrible...
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Passenger Side
Writer/director Matt Bissonnette’s Passenger Side takes place mostly within a grotty BMW while the forgotten corners of a decidedly glossless Los Angeles drift by. But before we enter the confines of the old Bimmer,...
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Everyone Else
Maren Ade’s Everyone Else is one of the best relationship films I’ve ever seen. Now, when I say “relationship film,” I mean it in the Eric Rohmer/Woody Allen sense and not the (with respect)...
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Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl
At 101 years old, Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira has been making films since the 1930s. One can’t help but have respect for such a career, but, sadly, that’s about as much as I...
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The Exploding Girl
The film opens on Ivy (Zoe Kazan) sleeping in the back of a car on her way home to New York City for spring break. This first shot, with the reflections racing across her...
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Cinevardaphoto
Agnes Varda was one of the founding architects of the French New Wave. She is a fascinating artist: wise and compassionate; analytical and profound, with hints of mischief. I called her 2008 documentary, the...
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Shirin
Director Abbas Kiarostami, by his very nature as a filmmaker, makes my job difficult. To review his work is, in a way, to betray his work. The illusions in Kiarostami’s more experimental/conceptual films depend...