People on Sunday (Germany, 1920) is a delightful, effervescent rarity from the late silent era with irresistible bona fides. Not only did this low-budget 1930 German film influence a generation of filmmakers, it launched the careers of some mighty impressive talents who, as hungry young filmmakers, collaborated on this buoyant little portrait of a lazy […]
There may be no more sensual director in the world than Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-Wai, and In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong, 2000) is one of his richest and most melancholy works, a shadow dance of would-be lovers sketched in suggestions and intimations. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai star as next door neighbors […]
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman were so successful in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession that they all reteamed for All that Heaven Allows (1955) as Sirk became Universal’s house melodramatist. He turned improbable plots into social commentary and pulling back the covers of middle class hypocrisy with an ironic visual style and an almost operatic emotional […]
French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin makes films about the messiness of families, lovers, and creative lives that can become quite messy in their telling. Ismael’s Ghosts (France, 2018) jumps abruptly back and forth in time and between biography and fiction and dreams, smudging the line between biography, fiction, and artistic imagination. Desplechin regular Mathieu Amalric is […]
Her (2013), the first film from Spike Jonze since his underrated take on Where the Wild Things Are, returns to the territory of his debut film Being John Malkovich but without the satirical edge. Like his fellow filmmakers and former collaborators Michael Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Jonze is narratively playful and challenging, but his […]
Billy Wilder was one of the great directors of classic American comedy. Avanti! (1972), based on the play by Samuel Taylor, is one of the director’s attempts to adapt his trademark mix of wit, romance, and sex to the more permissive era of the 1970s and one of the best films in the last act […]
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is one of the loveliest of Billy Wilder’s pictures, a sly, bittersweet, autumnal film that approaches the Holmes legacy with a sense of humor and a sense of respect. Robert Stephenson plays Holmes as a genial, witty fellow well aware of his reputation and quite a bit more […]
Patricia Rozema’s adaptation of Mansfield Park (1999) combines Jane Austen’s novel with elements of her letters and journals to turn heroine Fanny Price (played by Frances O’Conner) into a woman of self-possession and confidence. The strong-willed, creative girl in an impoverished family is sent to live with snooty rich relatives, where she is more than […]
Red Dust (1932), the jungle melodrama starring Clark Gable as a rubber plantation foreman in East Asia and Jean Harlow as the street smart showgirl who takes a powder from “Say-gone” (as they call the future Vietnamese city of Saigon) and lands upriver in his primitive plantation manor, is as sexy, frank, and grown-up as […]
Keri Russell glows in Waitress (2007), the sweet, sour and sexy film by actress-turned-filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. She is amazingly funny as Jenna, the melancholy pie queen of a highway eatery in a vaguely drawn small Southern town. This is a place where the waitresses call each other “Hon” and toss in a little good-natured attitude […]
