Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Bergman’s enigmatic masterpiece
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 02/05/2014
» Ingmar Bergman’s most memorable films almost always drew on his personal memories and especially his personal torments. But by the time Persona was released in 1966, even his greatest admirers may have been tiring of his ongoing argument with God, which he had been chronicling on-screen for a decade.
Subtle spooks
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 21/03/2014
» Horror films are everywhere now, with zombies and vampires rampant, but we don’t see many traditional ghost stories. The reason isn’t hard to guess — most of the audience for horror consists of young gore geeks who drop off to sleep if 15 minutes pass without someone munching someone else’s guts. When they wake up, the verdict is announced — boring!
A life less ordinary
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 04/01/2013
» Movies about addiction date in interesting ways. Seen today, Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, whose lurid treatment of alcoholism made the film a bombshell of controversy in 1945 (it may have been the first movie to present alcoholism as a disease rather than a character flaw) and won it a shelfful of awards, looks antiquated now. Its overwrought dialogue and posture of appalled shock at behaviour that subsequent films have made familiar to the point of cliche haven't aged well.
The end of days
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 16/11/2012
» Viewers who have followed Bela Tarr's ongoing chronicle of humankind succumbing to terminal misery and entropy will find the process reaching its bitter end here (the word is that it is the director's final film, his definitive statement). The Turin Horse is a cinema snob's wet dream: shot in the bleakest black and white with Hungarian dialogue (very little of it), filled with takes that go on for long minutes in which virtually nothing happens, a mood of intensifying breakdown and despair that culminates in complete stasis. Not a lot here for the Great Unwashed, the Batman crowd, but even they will have to admit that the film is stunning to look at, whether or not it really works as a whole and does justice to its colossal theme.
The end of an era
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 01/06/2012
» There are no trysting lovers steaming up windows in Roy Baker's 1958 film on the sinking of the Titanic, and if there were they would be badly out of place. If James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, Titanic, was an uneasy welding together of a trite across-class-lines romance and a terrific disaster movie, Baker's film more successfully combines the styles of a feature film and a documentary.
Hypnotic epic
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 02/03/2012
» Most of the mysteries referred to in the title are of the kind found in those immense, ultra-melodramatic serialised novels that kept 19th-century readers waiting for the next issue. The generous documentary extras included with this new release explain that the super-prolific Camilo Costelo Branco, whose 1854 serial novel Mysteries of Lisbon is adapted here, sometimes wrote these long-running, cliffhanging narratives. So here we have all of the mothers dead in childbirth, multiple identities, long-shot coincidences, crimes of passion, stories-within-stories-within-stories, and other tasty ingredients that make those books fun to read even today.