Everyone knows that Godard is a bit of an acquired taste, and that no matter how much some cinephile effuses about the man’s genius, there are plenty of people that are going to find his movies unwatchable. This film, however, is a bit of an exception. It’s a rollicking tale with quirky narration (done by [...]

Well, after taking a look at the blurb on the DVd cover and feeling in the mood for some black and white Nouvelle Vague classics, i decided to get this one…and was quite disappointed. The themes treated in the movie, including the worldwide conspiracy against disaffected lefty artists in Paris, made me roll my eyes [...]

I’ve waited a long time to lose the Desplechin virginity, and finally got around to it recently by watching “Un Conte De Noel.” The films tells the story of the Vuillard family, with a history of shared mental and physical illnesses,making their family an atypically unhappy one.
The critics, from what I’ve read thus far, [...]

I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago but never got the chance to write about it: There’s a Channel4.com review which sums it up nicely:
For Blier, the surreal agent provocateur who would make a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, the film’s male aggression, absurd black humour and absence of any [...]

Les Amants (The Lovers) is another of the Louis Malle CC films I’ve picked up before the DVD shop got harmonized for the Olympics. They say this is the film that made Jeanne Moreau into a star. She had already been famous before this (1958), most notably as the youngest woman to ever become a [...]

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.
Of course, [...]

It’s amazing the kind of stiuff that you find at your local DVD shops in Shanghai especially if that shop.,
like the one that I go to, is run by a guy that is into art films and therefore stocks his fair share of
Criterion Collections. I’d watched Cleo from 5 to 7 before, and I thought [...]

This French website of ideas and culture has, thankfully, an English section* and in it an essay enttiled “Democratic Universalism as a Historical Problem”. In that I
found the following passage:
Hamilton thus spoke of the �vices of democracy� and criticized its propensity towards excess. The terms �deathly illness,� �confusion,� and �license� were regularly associated with �democracy.� [...]

Ever since stumbling across his grave at the Montparnasse cemetery, I have been not quite obsessed � persistently inquisitive � about the life and times of the Romanian-French poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dadaist movement. I was just looking over his single entry in Wikipedia, and found this quote plastered on [...]