Between Two Worlds

Class struggle in the French cinema of today

A good old-fashioned melodrama in not-so-good new-fashioned disguise

The Real Blonde by Tom DiCillo shows as much promise as his first film, Living in Oblivion of 1995. Both are very funny, but both are rather inward looking — obsessed with movie making and acting — and both somehow fail to hold together very well. The Real Blonde, in fact, is like a collection…

Pink Flamingos by John Waters (1972), now re-released, is not a film which it is really possible to review. It contains sex scenes, both homo and heterosexual, weird perversions, bestiality, coprophagy, incest, madness, murder, torture, mutilation, rape, kidnapping, cannibalism, and the sale of human babies — and to all of this it invites and (in…

Down to Earth, Chris Rock’s remake (directed by Chris and Paul Weitz) of Heaven Can Wait (1978)—itself a remake of Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)—is a disappointment. Though there are some very funny things in it, its glib message about being oneself turns out to be a cover for being self-indulgent, in the style (I’m…

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…