Ik-Film

Sep 22, 2009 — One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however,...

Sep 17, 2009 — Almost twenty years before they enacted such splendid suffocation in Max Ophuls’s swoony masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . , the agelessly glamorous Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux first starred together in another tear-jerking big-screen romance. Giving...

Sep 17, 2009 — Le jour se lève was Marcel Carné’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and their third entry in the poetic realism cinema movement, following their vanguard Drôle de drame and Port of Shadows. Both of those films were...

Sep 17, 2009 — Director René Clément had conveyed the darker aspects of human nature in 1952’s heartbreaking Forbidden Games, which became an international, award-winning hit despite the rawness and melancholy of its antiwar message. The bitter irony and willingness to grapple with the...

Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...

Sep 10, 2009 — Is That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at their most heart-stoppingly beautiful and mutually enraptured, one of the most romantic movies ever made because or in spite of the fact that it was designed as propaganda? It...

Sep 9, 2009 — For the second year in a row, the Criterion Collection is going into the Catskill Mountains to curate a weekend of cinema for All Tomorrow’s Parties New York. Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, ATP is a music festival that was...

Sep 8, 2009 — “It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition (1959–61), but in his anguish and existential despair, he also speaks...

Aug 30, 2009 — There’s more to cooking on camera than Top Chef, and despite films like Big Night or Julie and Julia that have inspired foodies across the country to run out and prepare elaborate meals, it’s rare that we get a cinematic...

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...