Film

IF BILLY WILDER HAD DIRECTED SCHINDLER’S LIST * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series. The first exchange concerns Billy Wilder, and our contributors are producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer. Stage and…

MEET “MEET CUTE” * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange…

YOU BET I THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU Against other self-made Boomers like Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford, I’ll take Warren Beatty in a walk. Productions in which Beatty was the 800-lb gorilla are virtually all he has made for 50 years, and he has stayed political but mostly avoided being didactic (Reds notwithstanding)….

SOME TITLES LIE All Governments Lie is a strident and incompetent piece of activism that collates talking-head journalists with shots of the Capitol Mall, statues of Jefferson, and clips of George W. Bush and Colin Powell telling lies. The subtitle (Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone) promises a biography, an investigation, at least…

GIANT KILLER * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns…

THE WORLD AFLAME [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns Billy Wilder. After we  run  the previously-published seven original entries (Part III by Mr. Holland  last week; Part IV  by Mr. Rohrer  below) new posts will…

AUTEURIAL BLOOD [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns Billy Wilder. After we  run  the previously-published seven original entries (Part II by Mr. Rohrer  last week; Part III by Mr. Holland  below) new posts will…

WILDER IN THE HOLE [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns Billy Wilder. After we  run  the previously-published seven original entries (Part I by Mr. Holland last week; Part II by Mr. Rohrer…

THIS MOVIE HATES AMERICA Recently I’ve been feeling pudgy and middle-class. I live in Encino, I drive a Toyota, I bake cookies as a hobby. I ate a Trader Joe’s lamb vindaloo for lunch yesterday and complained it was too spicy. I have always felt that people like this are broken and not to be…

PRESENT THREAT While Do Not Resist only partly takes place in Ferguson, Missouri, several minutes of immersive, haunting footage place the film in the rare company of The Battle of Algiers and Bloody Sunday. But the civil unrest Pontecorvo and Greengrass filmed was staged. Accompanied by producer Laura Hartwick, Craig Atkinson filmed the Ferguson protests…

SOME LIKE IT WILDER [Editor’s Note:  Oeuvre Total is a film-discussion series between producer Michael Holland and critic Jason Rohrer, begun at Bitter Lemons  and continuing here at  Stage and Cinema. The first ten-part Oeuvre Total exchange concerns Billy Wilder. After we  run  the previously-published seven original entries, beginning with Part I below, new posts will appear in the coming…

FEMIWITCH Men are definitely the outsiders in director and writer Anna Biller’s engrossing and increasingly strange film, a movie which frankly defies easy description; the  genre could very well be  designated as “feminist satire.” Set in the 1970s, and utilizing period costumes and sets, along with the wonderfully over-saturated colorful Technicolor hues of a Sirkian melodrama, The…

MIXED BUSINESS Vlad Yudin’s provocatively titled informational documentary The Hurt Business feels like a cinematic version of a survey course on the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA). For those in the dark but curious about MMA, Mr. Yudin’s film, narrated by longtime MMA fan Kevin Costner, can serve as a useful introduction. But even…

ONE IN A MINYAN In Daniel Burman’s brisk and sharp human comedy The Tenth Man, Ariel (Alan Sabbagh) returns to Once, the Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires where he grew up, to visit his father Usher for Purim. A 30-something irreligious Jew who resides in Manhattan and has a dancer girlfriend, Ariel left his home…

A GREAT SESSION, BUT THERAPY SHOULD CONTINUE “So, what brings you here?” asks the Professor of his newest patient, in David Ruehm’s Therapy for a Vampire, a stylized romantic comedy fairy tale set in 1932 Vienna. “I’m not good at self-reflection,” replies Count Geza von Kozsnom (a mesmerizing Tobias Moretti). “I feel old and tired….

LEAR: KING OF THE 1970s SITCOM “Maybe [people] continued to agree with Archie Bunker – as I said earlier, you can’t change people’s minds, but you can get them to think.”   – Norman Lear When you think of words to describe 1960s television, one word that won’t come to mind is “edgy”.   It’s almost hard…

BACK TO BLACK Naïve and primitive in style, Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 feature debut Black Girl is a political statement regarding some of the aftereffects of French colonialism on Senegal. The simple, if not simplistic, story concerns a young African woman, Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who is invited to France by a white family to take…

ALMOST TRUSTWORTHY The collapse of the Soviet Union led to, among other things, an epidemic of child homelessness in its former republics. Whether orphaned, escaping impossible domestic situations or poorly run government institutions, on the streets these children become junkies, prostitutes, criminals. They are used and abused, raped, beaten and murdered. Officials’â€assuming they are not…