Queen, The

Thanks to our 21^st century taste for exhibitionism, documentaries are now a better bet for revealing and harrowing portrayals of domestic and family life than fiction

Pity the poor celebrity! Harried, persecuted and plotted against by paparazzi scum, is it any wonder if he takes the law into his own hands?

What looks like an attempt at satire has lost, or never found, that edge of hatred that good satire needs

There are two perfect, transcendent moments in the Tale of Autumn, or Conte d’Automne, which is the fourth and perhaps the best of Eric Rohmer’s magisterial series, “Tales of the Four Seasons.” The first of these is when we suddenly realize that the simple story of two women, married Isabelle (Marie Rivière) and her divorced…

[See “Entry from June 30, 2010” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

It is not a particularly original or even, necessarily, interesting observation that marriage, like other symbiotic relationships, is often a matter of complementary pathologies. Or what would be pathologies if they were found in an individual. Benoit Jacquot (A Single Girl, The Disenchanted) has given us a portrait of such a marriage—and not much hope…