The “bonnes femmes” of Claude Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) are four shopgirls at a small appliance store in Paris. Good time girl Bernadette Lafont spends her nights in empty flirtations with boorish womanizers, social climbing Lucile Saint-Simon withers under the disdainful gaze of her boyfriend’s haughty parents, seemingly confident Stephane Audran secretly follows her […]
The disturbed world of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson’s deformed psyches and demented morality comes to life in This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), one of the more unpredictable works in a career defined by the author’s disturbingly treacherous tales. What makes this dreamy adaptation by director Michael Oblowitz and screenwriter Larry Gross work is […]
A faithful remake, a spirited updating, and a deft, colorful, thoroughly entertaining heist film swimming in character and atmosphere, Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief (2002), his reworking of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur, may not be his best film, but it is one of his most purely enjoyable. The payoffs are many: Nick Nolte’s shaggy performance […]
Paul Schrader spent decades of exploring the scarred psyches of American men who succumb to violence when pain overcomes reason, but nowhere as poignantly and powerfully as in Affliction (1997), his adaptation of Russell Banks’ novel. Affliction stars Nick Nolte as Wade Whitehouse, an unambitious, jocular small town sheriff and odd job man to a […]
In the early 2000s, an urban legend circulated about a young Japanese woman who watched film Fargo and travelled to Minnesota to search for the treasure buried in the snow. Filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner turned that apocryphal story into Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014), a deft, a sweetly offbeat indie drama starring Rinko Kikuchi […]
The name Stephen Poliakoff doesn’t mean much to American TV and movie fans but in Britain he’s an acclaimed playwright and writer / director of original dramas on both the big screen and small screen. The five-part mini-series Dancing on the Edge follows the fortunes of a black jazz band in 1930s London as a […]
“I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.” The most inventive time travel film ever made, Shane Carruth’s almost one man production (he’s director, writer, producer, star, sometime camera operator, and pretty much anything else that needed to be done) is also the most aggressively, tantalizingly obtuse. Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) […]
