The New Republic

Right from the start of his career, it was clear that Terrence Malick was out to challenge the conventions of the art to which he was dedicating himself. Even that first film, Badlands, showed some unconventional ideas about time. His subsequent films, varying in success, all showed an impulse to see, to realize, in an individual way. READ MORE >>

At last. A documentary that I didn’t even know I was waiting for. READ MORE >>

The French director-writer François Ozon once made a memorable film called Swimming Pool, in which a parched writer was strengthened by contact with another person. Now he makes In the House, where an encounter with imagination again enlivens a writer, and entails danger. READ MORE >>

After the title Reality, the next thing we see is a gilded carriage drawn by two white horses rolling through the Italian countryside. Soon it turns in through huge gates opened by servants in eighteenth-century costume. The carriage has arrived at a huge villa with lovely grounds filled with festivating people in modern dress. The carriage has brought a bride and groom to their wedding party. READ MORE >>

Renoir is the film’s title, but it might as well be plural. It seems to promise a film about Jean Renoir just because it is a film, but it turns out to be about two Renoirs: Jean and his father Pierre-Auguste, the great Impressionist painter. It is also, to an equal share, about a young woman called Dédé who is seen in the very opening shot bicycling along a sunny road. This sequence is a tip of the hat to modern French film. READ MORE >>

The Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami has now made his second feature in exile. READ MORE >>

Lore, not the English word for a body of tradition but the German female name, is the title. The film is set in northern Germany, mid-1945. The war is just ending. The German people are the subject, as seen through only a few of them. Lore is the teenage daughter, about sixteen, of an SS officer and his equally Nazi wife. We are going to meet a few of the cheering thousands we saw in newsreels, now that the cheering is over. READ MORE >>

The Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, have been making films since 1962; their work, almost always in Italy, has almost always been innovative, intense, and involved with social and political subjects. Sometimes they have not always been able to control the strength they summoned, but their films have mattered. When I learned that they were making a film of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I was doubly alerted. READ MORE >>

In 1990, when I saw a documentary about the Guarneri Quartet, I concluded that all of us who are not members of a quartet have wasted our lives. The film made it seem that playing in a quartet is the most continually progressive and congenial way to spend a life in art. At last comes another film about a quartet, this time fictional. Musically, it isn’t in a class with the documentary, but it investigates other aspects that result from their long union. READ MORE >>

ADMIRERS OF THE Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke, of whom I hope there are many, may be surprised by his latest film. Such pictures as The Piano Teacher and Funny Games have not flinched from considerable violence when Haneke thought it was needed. His latest work is of different daring, though quite unafraid. READ MORE >>