The New Republic

Goodbye SoloRoadside AttractionsThe Song of SparrowsRegent Releasing READ MORE >>

Goodbye Solo.  Rahmin Bahrani, American-born son of Iranian parents, made his first two films about New York. But his third, set in North Carolina, is Iranian in mood and manner.  A Senegalese taxi driver and a grizzled American loner are linked by the prospect of the latter’s suicide.  Tender, deep, beautiful.  (5/6/09) READ MORE >>

Hunger IFC Films American Swing Magnolia Pictures Steve McQueen is a well-known British artist who is becoming a well-known film-maker. Hunger, his first feature film, is less a promising work than a fulfillment. It has nothing to do with Knut Hamsun's famous novel of the same title (beautifully filmed in 1966). It deals with the Irish Troubles, specifically the hunger strike in a Northern Ireland prison led by Bobby Sands in 1981, a strike that led to his death and nine others. READ MORE >>

Everlasting MomentsIFC films12Sony Pictures ClassicsThe best films I know by the greatly gifted Jan Troell, who is Swedish, are set in the Scandinavian past. Here's Your Life takes place in Sweden during World War I; The Emigrants and The New Land form a diptych about nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants; Hamsun is of course about the Norwegian writer who died in 1952. Merely to mention those films is to wish that every viewer knew them. READ MORE >>

Katyn Koch-Lorber Films Tokyo! Liberation Entertainment READ MORE >>

From “Album of My Germany”   READ MORE >>

From “Album of a Theater Critic” One of the jobs I have had in my life was the post of theater critic of The New York Times, where I was for eight months in 1966. It seems now like merely one of the jobs. When I went there, it seemed final. READ MORE >>

From “Album of Marilyn Monroe” READ MORE >>

Everlasting Moments. The lyric-humanist Swedish director Jan Troell has made another gem, this time chiefly about a working-class wife and mother in 1907 who happens to acquire a camera. Her view of herself and her life alters through this camera in Troell’s exploratory rather than highly dramatic way. (Reviewed 4/1/09) READ MORE >>

GomorrahIFC FilmsOur City DreamsDi San Luca Films READ MORE >>