Third Man, The

The title of the latest movie to come out of the Evil Empire is Disney’s “The Kid”, possibly because the filmmakers were afraid that people might confuse it with the Charlie Chaplin classic of 1921—though more likely because Disney’s appalling hubris just can’t bear not to have its loathsome name on everything it produces. The…

Liv Ullmann’s direction of the screenplay of her former director, “mentor” and lover, Ingmar Bergman in Faithless (Trolösa), is remarkably competent—remarkably Bergmanian—in all kind of technical ways, but I wonder if she was fully alive to the subtleties built into this story of a broken marriage? For that matter, I wonder if Bergman himself is?…

A Place Called Chiapas, directed by the Canadian Nettie Wild, is a documentary about what the New York Times has rightly called “the world’s first post-modern revolution.” It begins with military vehicles emerging from darkness and a voiceover talking about the Zapatista movement of the Chiapan campesinos, led by Subcomandante Marcos, as having been “born…

Despite its apocalyptic theme, Last Night by the young Canadian director, Don McKellar, is a shockingly modest—and thus, to my way of thinking anyway, likeable—little film. Set on the human race’s last day, before an unspecified cataclysm puts an end to all life on earth, the film attempts to make no profound political or spiritual…

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…

An interesting French film that plays around with movie-stereotypes of the police, though it could do more to subvert them