The New Republic

Possibly excepting the Germans, French film-makers have always been the ones most intent on using the medium impossibly—to address ideas as ideas, through an art that is otherwise designed. Hundreds of films around the world have carried intellectual weight and worth, but usually those films are dramas or comedies whose characters happen to be intellectually fraught. READ MORE >>

The third time was the charm. Well, if not charm exactly, at least some justification. The Bourne Identity (Universal) was the third film about the CIA--after The Sum of All Fears and Bad Company--that I had seen in three weeks, and it was the first to afford some entertainment. Adapted by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron from a twenty-year-old Robert Ludlum novel, it has a setup that tickles some interest in the eventual payoff (workaday terms, but applicable). READ MORE >>

In the August 9, 1922 issue of this magazine, Frances Taylor Patterson wrote: "In a day of emotional and artistic deliquescence on the screen, a picture with the fresh strength and pictorial promise of Nanook of the North is in the nature of Revelation." The screen has recurrently deliquesced since then, and once again comes a film from the north to remind us of that fact by its revelation of strength. Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook has reigned since 1922 as the best film about Inuit life: now it is joined and in some ways surpassed by Zacharias Kunuk's The Fast Runner (Lot 47). READ MORE >>

It’s back. Not that it is ever absent for long, but the present instance is particularly irritating. Here again is the oxymoron—the picture that combines strong execution and a poor screenplay. In this case the screenplay is not merely poor, it is dreadful, but it is more ostentatiously so because the other components are so fine. READ MORE >>

The Italian film-maker Nanni Moretti has had a schismatic career. Almost unknown in America, he is a critical and public darling in Europe, a winner of festival prizes. Because he writes and directs and stars in his films and because his roles are generally quiet and thoughtful, and sometimes thoughtfully comic, he has been compared to Woody Allen. (No physical resemblance: Moretti is tall, slim, bearded, good-looking.) This is to compare George Gershwin with Stephen Sondheim simply because each wrote smart songs about contemporary life. READ MORE >>

In his short story "Killings," as in others of his stories, Andre Dubus looks down on his characters like a fairly friendly god, comprehending mortals' troubles with just slight amusement. Dubus, as god, has a uniquely blended view from above, understanding but cool. He lets his characters work through all the anguish, tension, bitterness that they encounter or evolve for themselves, something like animals in mazes, except he knows that they have souls.  READ MORE >>

Early in 1951 I visited Arthur Miller in Brooklyn Heights. I was then an editor at Bantam Books, which had just bought the paperback rights of Death of a Salesman from Viking, the publishers of the hardbound edition. The head of Bantam adored the play but felt that, for the reader of paperbacks, there ought to be more descriptive and connective material to make the characters more vivid and to clarify the time transitions. He knew that I'd had some theater experience, so he delegated me to go out to Brooklyn and ask Miller to make additions to his play. READ MORE >>

David Lynch once said: "I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable." This is a truth past question, I'd say, but how is an artist to make use of this truth? Lynch, whose directing and writing career glows with talent, has developed a mode that serves his perception. He devises films that seem sensible, sufficiently so as to engage us, and then he proceeds to subvert sense. Other artists structure their work in an order that itself pleases us and then use their order as an avenue to fundamental disorder. READ MORE >>

In 1970 costa-gavras made The Confession, a film about the so-called Slansky trial in Prague in 1952. The screenplay was based on the book of the same name by one of the defendants in that trial, Artur London; Yves Montand played London. Principally because of Costa-Gavras's stern direction and Montand's grimly interiorized performance, the film was a chilling plunge into political cruelty and mystery. Now a Czech-born American director, Zuzana Justman, has made a documentary on the same subject, called A Trial in Prague (Cinema Guild), that is more obliquely yet at least equally chilling. READ MORE >>

Comparisons and pigeonholes are first aids for critics. Examples: "Mr. A's film treats the same theme as Mr. B's, but it doesn't [or does] surpass it." And: "Mr. A's film is one more of the line that began with Mr. B's twenty years ago." What convenient compass points such remarks provide for placing a new work, what apertures for evaluation. READ MORE >>