Remember the Night (1940)

Everything that is important in Girl, Interrupted, directed by James Mangold and based on the memoir by Suzanna Kaysen, can be condensed into one comment by the mental institution attendant, Valerie (Whoopi Goldberg) as she attempts to give the reluctant Suzanna (Winona Ryder) a bath. “This place is a f****** fascist torture chamber,” says the…

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…

Living Out Loud, written and directed by Richard LaGravenese is a handsome tribute to a charming woman, but it has no idea where it is going. Or rather: it knows where it wants to go, which is in the direction of a romantic rescue, but hasn’t got the nerve to go there. The story concerns…

M:I-2, directed by John Woo and written by Robert Towne, is like the original Mission Impossible (1996) in being a postmodern-style romance of technology. The earlier film, which was directed by Brian de Palma, did for the deus ex machina what Shakespeare did for the Aristotelian unities, which is to say that it blew the…

Nenette et Boni by Claire Denis is a rather enjoyable little meditation on the disjunction, in our late 20th century culture, between sex and context, between the act of coupling and its moral and biological consequences. Boni, short for Boniface (Colin Grégoire), a young man of about 19 or 20 who works as a pizza…

A romantic murder mystery out of Argentina that has a lot to recommend it