Wiseman at MoMA

Reviews & Features

No Blade of Grass

No Blade of Grass
08 Feb, 9:02 AM

“No blade of grass grows, and birds sing no more; no joy or laughter where waves wash the shore; gone are all the answers, lost is all we have won; gone is the hope that life will go on.” As the movie progresses, that last line of the first verse proves to be unsettlingly prophetic. No Blade of Grass is less about preserving humanity in the face of annihilation than it is about the characters’ bitter realization that their world may be irreversibly changed.

Review by Cullen Gallagher  /  Comment

I Fidanzati

I Fidanzati
02 Feb, 10:47 AM

First the glimmering white and black images of Ermanno Olmi’s I Fidanzati light up the screen and warm your heart. Then they abruptly flicker out—like imagined fleeting glances of a love affair you can’t forget but couldn’t hold onto. In seventy-some minutes, I Fidanzati teaches – no, simply lets you learn – about distance, time and the uncontrollable, bittersweet ways in which romances wax and wane.

Review by Ben Ewing  /  Comment

Taken

Taken
01 Feb, 10:13 AM

While the xenophobic anxiety of Americans abroad isn’t a new subject (even Alfred Hitchcock approached the topic in his 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much), it’s difficult to watch certain scenes in Taken without thinking of contemporary parallels. It is moments like these in which the politics of action heroism reveal their hidden complexity. With the line between “good guy” and “bad guy” blurred, we allow the action hero to cross certain moral boundaries that would otherwise be prohibited.

Review by Cullen Gallagher  /  Comments (1)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
27 Jan, 9:22 AM

While there’s no denying the obvious soullessness to Dielman’s daily routine – subtlety, it seems, is not one of Akerman’s pillars of good filmmaking – it would be too easy to classify Jeanne Dielman as nothing more than a passive-aggressive feminist film—a purposefully long and tiresome experience (and experiment) that challenges the male-centric eyes of cinema to endure four hours of what many women endure for forty years.

Review by Adam Balz  /  Comments (1)

Les biches

Les biches
26 Jan, 9:27 AM

With looks as blank as these, it falls to Chabrol to make sense of them for us. He becomes, in a sense, a kind of translator, and uses his camera to reveal the quiet violence coursing beneath the façade. To pull it off, Chabrol could, like Hitchcock, dutch the angle (as in I, Confess), or subsume us in point of view (Rear Window), or try out terrific tricks (Vertigo), but – surprise, surprise – he’s too damn French for that.

Review by Sam Wasson  /  Comment

Seconds

Seconds
25 Jan, 9:35 AM

This 1966 film, starring one of Hollywood’s biggest movie actors at the height of his success, is a sci-fi/horror/character study, and it flopped spectacularly upon its initial release. The narrative points cryptically in several directions without ever settling on one, confounding not just possible meanings and interpretations but the highways and byways that viewers take to find them. We know that the story is a pointer, but we’re unsure of precisely what it points to.

Review by Aaron Cutler  /  Comments (1)

The Baby of Mâcon

The Baby of Mâcon
19 Jan, 10:54 AM

Peter Greenaway – Violence in a Peter Greenaway film is presented under the pretense of fabrication, because his films are so notably visually embellished. But what makes this sequence particularly frightening is that this pretense does not diminish the severity of what is occurring in principle: a woman’s greatest torture and its approving audience.

Review by Rumsey Taylor  /  Comment

Prospero’s Books

Prospero’s Books
15 Jan, 11:57 AM

Peter Greenaway – From the opening forward, the film remains relentlessly, coercively visual, as impenetrably dense as an encyclopedia of literary and aesthetic allusions. Prospero’s Books is an astonishing work, in this sense. But it is not precisely the cinema that astonishes; rather, it is the collage of scenario, superimposition and meta text, and this, for better or worse, is unique to no other body of work.

Review by Rumsey Taylor  /  Comment

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
14 Jan, 3:46 PM

Peter Greenaway – In a body of work many have described as chilly or elitist, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover stands as an exemplary and impassioned film about love and life under siege, an ode to that which is rich and strange in all things, a vision beyond the strictures of conventional art-making that magnifies rather than denies its many sumptuous pleasures. That it is also an unflinching exploration of all those things we wish to avoid is a testament to Greenaway’s conviction that art is not an escape from real life, but an experience that allows us to feel it more deeply. And that sometimes it must be rammed down our throats.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comments (2)

Drowning by Numbers

Drowning by Numbers
14 Jan, 9:14 AM

Peter Greenaway – The look of Drowning By Numbers is slightly unusual for Greenaway: the film was shot on location in East Anglia, mostly outside, mixing natural light with artificial in order to produce, in Greenaway’s words, “a surreal effect of trying to compete with God on his own lighting scheme.” The metaphor of competition is appropriate, since there is a protracted tussle going on throughout the film between Greenaway’s ultra-refined aesthetic and the provincial English setting. Greenaway has always been at once unmistakably English and indefinably alien (or pan-European, which for many English people comes to the same thing).

Review by Evan Kindley  /  Comment

Screening Log

Recent Comments