Our Life

Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...

Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.

Oct 25, 2011 — An Erle C. Kenton–directed Paramount feature based on the 1896 H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls (1932) is the story of a mad scientist’s attempts to convert wild animals into human beings by...

Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...

Oct 4, 2011 — The spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pier Paolo Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.

Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

Oct 4, 2011 — Vilified, censored, banned, denied commercial distribution, and long unavailable, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous film lives more in reputation and rumor than in memory.

Sep 26, 2011 — No preconceptions. No rehearsals. No rules. Assayas's on-the-fly bio is exhilaratingly all over the map.

Sep 19, 2011 — When Claude Chabrol’s first film, Le beau Serge, had its premiere at the 1958 Cannes Film Festival (out of competition), a fellow critic at Cahiers du cinéma, François Truffaut, wrote: “Technically, the film is as masterly as if Chabrol had...

Sep 13, 2011 — Poignant news to pass along: our good friend and frequent contributor Michael Sragow has announced on his Baltimore Sun blog that at the end of this week, he will be hanging up his hat as a regular film critic. This...