As Peter Bondanella argues in Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, the movement we now call “neorealism” is as bound up in its own history as it is in the…
The child scrounger is about as “neorealism” as it gets, pointing toward his counterpart in Buñuel’s Los Olvidados from a couple years later. And it’s not neorealism without a heavy dose…
Michele Lagny, “The feeling gaze: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938)” – The essay traces some of the context of the film’s release, particularly the way it was somewhat ordained to…
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it…
Thérèse Raquin (dir. Marcel Carné, 1953) – A step back from the poetic realism of Carné’s big-budget, big production Children of Paradise and lower-budget Port of Shadows, this is a melodrama that zooms…
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (dir. Robert Bresson, 1945) – So much to say about this, too little space/time. This is early Bresson, his second feature film. In many ways,…
Magic Mike (dir. Steven Soderberg, 2011) – Despite a lot of time trying to find reasons to validate this film from a critical perspective, it seems mainly noteworthy for being…
Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) – Really want/need to see it again, but here’s the first of the Craig-era Bond films that tries to get away from the Bourne legacy…
We’ll see how this goes. It’s going to start as a list, with attempts to fill in the space between titles with whatever jumps to memory. All About My Mother…
Black Narcissus (dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1947) – Mere days before starting a seminar in film and melodrama, I’ll make the tentative claim that this film constitutes an…
Les cousins (dir. Claude Chabrol, 1959) – If only the title had “dangereux” tacked onto the end. The film has some very swirly moments, little celebrations of freedom that align…
Mouchette (dir. Robert Bresson, 1967) – And that completes half of Bresson’s oeuvre. Still need to see the first two and the last four. Mouchette contains many clear similarities with…
