The Tragedy of Hamlet (Brook, 2002)
Peter Brook has forgotten more about Shakespeare than I'll ever know, and Adrian Lester is an underrated and underappreciated actor.
Category: Interviews
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Nicholas Ray
"You're tearing me apart!" The line--the plaintive cry--is synonymous with Rebel Without A Cause and hence with Nicholas Ray.
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Ingmar Bergman: (Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955)
My relationship with the films of Ingmar Bergman has been analogous to that with a popular elder at a new church: I respect the title and all, but I usually find myself squinting when people tell me he's more than just deathly serious.
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Luis Buñuel
Or, perhaps it is just my personal history (or lack of it) that leaves me probing the surfaces of Buñuel's works like blocks of marble, trying to feel my way around to the human portrait that lies beneath. Am I not Roman Catholic enough to "get it"? Not Latin enough? Surely it's not a case of my being not cynical enough? I mean, I find the contemptous light to which everyone in Buñuel's universe gets held up to misanthropic and tedious, and that's coming from a man who loves Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
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Michelangelo Antonioni
If the name "Antonioni" gives the neophyte cinephile pause, he can take solace in the fact confusion loves company almost as much as misery does. Andrew Sarris begins his introduction of Jean-Luc Godard's interview with cinema's Michelangelo by reminding readers that L'Avventura (1960) was hissed at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
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At the Death House Door (Gilbert and James, 2008)
I have read some responses to film that dismiss as (and for) being too politically slanted. Maybe, but as with Hoop Dreams and Stevie, Gilbert and James are interested, first and foremost, in people. The film reflects the beliefs of the people in it.
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At the Edge of the World (Stone, 2008)
As a documentary, the film is informative without being too polemical. It has a point of view, and its makers have (I imagine) their sympathies. That said, the documentaries I like best are the ones that trust the audience enough to simply give it the story and let the viewers grapple with it on their own terms. In an age where docugandas seem to dominate the landscape, it is nice to see a film that is rich in ideas and circumspect in presentation.
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Peter Brook
The question that has preoccupied me since screening Peter Brook’s The Lord of the Flies is whether or not I would have recognized it as an important or excellent film without the Criterion Collection label on and treatment of the DVD.
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Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol, who is still alive and still working, has seventy-one directorial film credits listed at IMDB.com. By means of comparison, Michelangelo Antonioni has thirty-six, Robert Bresson seventeen, and Peter Brook a mere baker's dozen.
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Camp Diaries (Noland, 2009)
I asked Noland about the title of his film and specifically why he chose the word "diaries" since the photographs in the film were overlaid not with words from the occupants of the internment camps but words from news and film reels which mediated the images (and the experience) for the public.