Brigitte Bardot and the Spectacle of the Trial in Clouzot’s ‘La Vérité’
Despite Clouzot's apparent belief that a trial can't summarize a person's life, he has faith in cinema's ability to do so, as he conveys with La Vérité.
criterion
Disclosure, Dasein, and the Divine in Terrence Malick’s ‘The Tree of Life’
For Terrence Malick, “challenge” is a progressive verb. Tree of Life is a prayer that challenges us to see and think beyond all normative paradigms.
Wild Women, 40 Pricks, and Western Noir: On Barbara Stanwyck
Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns fuses the Western with film noir and provides ample space for Barbara Stanwyck commanding performance of a Western female heroine.
‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ Originated the Soderbergh Enigma
A delicate balance of the heady and the simple, Sex, Lies, and Videotape is both quintessential Steven Soderbergh and unlike anything he's directed since.
Slouching Toward Redemption: Ernst Lubitsch’s ‘Heaven Can Wait’
There's a rotten core at the center of Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait. No matter how engaging I find Haskell and Sariss's enchantment with the film, I cannot accede to their critical adulation of it and of Henry.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Optimism in ‘Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day’ Isn’t Cock-eyed, It’s Beady-eyed
The series of small and large triumphs snatched from the teeth of social inertia leaves one elated at human potential. Eight Hours Don't Make a Day is Fassbinder's version of a "feel-good" film.
In Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Virgin Spring’ God Might See but God Does Not Act
This tautly plotted story about rape, murder, and revenge is tightly tangled into another of the director's stark investigations of faith and morality.
Why Does Anyone Turn to a Michael Moore Film?
From Bowling for Columbine to the recent Fahrenheit 11/9, one wonders, what is being validated in Michael Moore films?
Action at a Distance: The Father in Víktor Erice’s El Sur
The Father is the wielder of profuse potency but it can only be maintained through distance and the renunciation of understanding, the willingness to embrace the mystery without examining it. But, necessarily, the child must penetrate that veil.
When Filming Itself Becomes More Important than the Film: Olivier Assayas’ ‘Cold Water’ (L’eau froide)
One of the paradoxes of cinema is that the creative experience itself must always be "worth" more than the result of the undertaking.
When Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’ Walks Into Your Mind, He Never Leaves
It's not enough to describe Dead Man as simply an anti-western; it's an iconoclastic deconstruction of late 19th Century American values and mores, many of which remain unabated more than a century later.