Don't Bother
[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 16, 2014]
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42 Up, the sixth in Michael Apted’s fascinating series of documentaries about a group of English schoolchildren first introduced to us at the age of seven in 1964, is the best yet. In a way this was predictable, since at 42 the sense of youthful expectation in which anything still seems possible has at last…
Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…
The Thief directed by Pavel Chukhrai is a deeply moving meditation on family and fatherhood told from the point of view of Sanya (Misha Philipchuk) the six year old son of the beautiful Katya (Yekaterina Rednikova). His father having died of wounds shortly after the end of the Second World War, Sanya was born in…
The 24 Hour Woman by Nancy Savoca stars Rosie Perez as Grace, the producer of a local daytime show TV show in New York called “The 24 Hour Woman.” The movie begins with Grace’s discovery that she is pregnant. Grace, her husband, Eddie (Diego Serrano), one of the on-air stars of the show and their…
Breakdown by Jonathan Mostow is a superior sort of thriller that is a step in the right direction after recent Hollywood examples of the genre—that is, in the direction of the things that ordinary, reasonable people really do fear. Which is to say not unbelievably big Amazonian snakes or volcanos erupting in downtown Los Angeles…
A harrowing but dramatically not very interesting account of the Japanese sack of Nanjing in 1937 which is said to have killed 300,000 Chinese
