Searchers, The

If I should happen to mention that the music in Mon Homme by Bertrand Blier consists entirely of selections by Barry White and Henryk Gorecki, you may get some idea of what a mess the picture is. At one level, it is, as are many of Blier’s earlier films, a masculine fantasy. The heroine is…

A Civil Action, directed by Steven Zaillian, is not, as I expected it to be, another of those God-awful Grisham things about noble, crusading trial lawyers getting the better of evil, corrupt insurance companies. In real life, it is usually the trial lawyers who are the bad guys and the insurance companies their victims, but…

A parable or fairy tale of social renewal from the master cinematic chronicler of the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie

Every few years around Christmas time, Steven Spielberg feels the need to trot out his social conscience for public examination. Four years ago it was Schindler’s List, a film designed to show how bad the Holocaust was. This year it is Amistad—the story of a slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839 which created…

Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d’Honneur), which came out in 2004 but is only now finding a release in the US, is a classic Chabrol-type study of the point where passion and madness intersect with ordinary life. Passion is represented by Senta (Laura Smet), who has changed her name from Stéphanie to adopt that…

A Friend of the Deceased (Un Ami du Défunt), a Franco-Ukrainian film directed by Vyacheslav Krishtofovich and written—in Russian—by Andrei Kourkov, has a very attractive premiss. Tolia (Alexandre Lazarev), a translator living in Kiev and living a hand-to-mouth, hustling sort of existence not untypical of life in the former Soviet Union, finds that his rather…