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Drowning Mona Drowning Mona directed by …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Drowning Mona directed by Nick Gomez If there were an Oscar for Best Reaction Shots, the top contender in next year’s race would have to be Casey Affleck. In Nick Gomez’s agreeably overheated comedy Drowning Mona, Affleck’s character, a hardworking, sweet-natured landscape gardener named Bobby Calzone, serves as the eye of a hurricane of smalltown
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Not One Less Not One LessDirected by Zhang Yimou …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Not One LessDirected by Zhang Yimou It’s an old story now, but worth recalling. In April of 1994 the government of China began a crackdown on its filmmakers that effectively put the brakes on what, for more than a half-decade, had been a cinematic outpouring of extraordinary force and vitality. Certainly, the regime had tightened
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The Way We Laughed The Way We Laughed directed …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The Way We Laughed directed by Gianni Amelio Without any close competition to speak of, Gianni Amelio ranks as the preeminent Italian filmmaker of the past two decades, a worthy heir to the likes of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini and Antonioni. The three movies he made in the first half of the 90s–Open Doors (1990),
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The Beach The Beach Directed by Danny …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The Beach Directed by Danny Boyle The Beach, the Leo-goes-tropical movie, sends the newly buff DiCaprio to a remote Thai island where a group of Western dropouts has decided to stay forever, keeping the place hidden and the world out. Thanks in no small measure to Darius Khondji’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography, this seaside hideaway looks
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A Brighter Summer Day A Brighter Summer Day …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Of course Hou wouldn’t have been voted best anything if his films had been opening here regularly for the past decade; most critics would have long since tired of dozing off in them. But then, the films didn’t open in part for a very good reason: Lincoln Center special events aside, there’s basically no audience
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Chesire on Rear Window; White Rips Magnolia

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Rear Window Directed by Alfred Hitchcock The world of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is one you can revisit, but not recapture; it exists, tantalizingly just out of reach, on the opposite side of one of the great divides in human experience. You’ve probably toured the place before; if so, you know that its setting rivals
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Holy Smoke Holy Smoke directed by Jane Campion …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

There’s always been a strong literary component to Campion’s work, from her early lapidarian shorts through the novelistic moods, conceits and (sometimes) sources of An Angel at My Table, Sweetie, The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady. She has also chosen wisely in the screenwriters who wrote or collaborated with her on the scripts
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Mr Mr. Death Directed by Errol …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

While Sergei Eisenstein was the filmmaker/theorist who stressed that the cinema’s creation of meaning is centered on the splice, few films give Eisenstein’s idea of "intellectual montage" a more creative contemporary spin than Errol Morris’ new documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Morris shows us, in effect, two images
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Close-Up Close-Up directed by Abbas Kiarostami Few …

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

This review, the last I will write for publication in the year that marks the end of the century of cinema, concerns Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, a 1990 Iranian feature that I recently named the most important film of the last decade and one of the 10 most important of the century. That estimation certainly reflects
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The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on . Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

FACE=”HelveticaNeue MediumExt” SIZE=5> You are standing of a summer’s day on a lovely beach, and you are doing what millions of others just out of eyeshot are doing. You are looking at the sand squiggling between your toes. You are perusing the broken shells just beyond your toes and the foamy wavelets curling against the
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