Worth Seeing
[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 25, 2013]
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It is, I believe, always a mistake to criticize a movie for not being the book it is based on—or, indeed, for not being anything at all. Every artist deserves the courtesy of being assessed on the basis of what he tried to do and not on that of what he didn’t try to do….
Jodie Foster is mad and she isn’t going to take it anymore. Fortunately for her, she can kill people and still be the victim herself
Ponette by Jacques Doillon is a tribute to the precocious brilliance of the child actress, Victoire Thivisol, and presumably to Doillon himself for directing her and the other remarkable children — Matiaz Bureau, Delphine Schilz and Leopoldine Serre — who take up most of the screen time here. The film is worth seeing just for…
Follow your bliss, middle-aged America! Quit your job, speak your mind, buy that muscle car you’ve always wanted. Start smoking pot again. Buff up and start an affair with a teenage girl. You may die for it, but you will die happy. Where have we heard this before? Periodically, the popular culture becomes receptive to…
Rounders directed by John Dahl is wish-fulfilment fantasy of a different sort from that of Let’s Talk About Sex. This is the fantasy of cool, and it is paradoxical that the hottest new stars seem to compete to out-cool each other. Needless to say, this loving cultivation of image has little or nothing to do…
I should say that I have not seen the original film of 1968 which inspired the remake of Sweet November, written by Kurt Voelker and directed by Pat O’Connor. But I have seen so many films so much like it — admittedly not many of them recently — that the remake looks very familiar indeed….
