Shadow of a Doubt
It’s no coincidence that Shadow of a Doubt, although several films removed from Alfred Hitchcock’s American debut, was the first masterpiece of his thirty-year sabbatical from British filmmaking. Fine though they were, films like Rebecca – playing around in desecrated aristocratic spaces and cavorting in the hallowed regions of spectral Old Money sticking to you like bones – played to an American producer’s somewhat stilted view of a British director’s propriety. Those not in the know would be excused for assuming they were British productions anyway. But Shadow of a Doubt, the director’s favorite among his own films, is a noir-infested, corrosively polluted work of invasion and sabotage that found the director not only unearthing the world of everyday American suburbia, but taking his newly adopted home to task in the process. Continue reading
Son of Saul
Cosmopolis
Sleeping Beauty
Oldboy
A decidedly outre expression of childhood trauma, Pan’s Labyrinth is a wartime fantasy from the deranged, consequence-ridden non-American realm of classical fables filtered through the oblong mind of one of modern cinema’s great dreamers. A bifurcated (unnecessarily, I might add) tale of adult conflict and childhood coping set against the Spanish front during WWII (when Franco’s repressive government was fighting ragged rebels), the most poignant gestures of director Guillermo del Toro’s vision are his most voluptuous and baroquely nightmarish. 
One must undeniably validate the valor and reflexivity of one of the few cinematic treatments of the Holocaust by an honest-to-god Holocaust survivor, but a good critic must also remember that bravery doesn’t inherently beget beauty. Director Roman Polanski’s troubled, torrid life aside, The Pianist – if a masterpiece – ought to withstand the test of time on its own merits, rather than on the shoulder’s of Polanski’s personal story, difficult though it may be to disentangle the two. No one film should be a sycophant to its back-story, fascinating though the behind-the-scenes realities of The Pianist may be. 
The cabal of proponents for Martin Scorsese’s most recent Goodfellas retread, The Wolf of Wall Street, dance around the central garrulousness of the film with superficially enticing claims that its engorged, laborious pomposity is tantamount to a claim against head honcho Jordan Belfort and his trying brand of indulgent charisma and hedonistic living. The claim doesn’t hold much water, although Scorsese’s intention may have been to pummel us with the initial sweat glands of living for the moment until our body’s capacity for perspiring freezes over in the thickets of hedonism. It may have been Scorsese’s vision, I might add, because that is exactly what he accomplished many years before with his tempest-as-torpor Goodfellas, a film where every kaleidoscopic camera track and exotic edit attunes us to the characters’ struggles to methamphetamine their lives straight into the hollow caves of an early grave. Over three hours, continual fluxion begets a grave chill as expending energy gives way to perpetual enervation. 
Legend would have it that, after decades of wallowing in admittedly pleasurable crypto-conservative roles, America’s resident taciturn brute Clint Eastwood shocked the world in 1992 with an unprecedented critique of the craven, callous dueling violences at the core of the American tradition. But masterpiece though it may be, Unforgiven was hardly unprecedented to those who were looking. Eastwood’s prior directorial efforts in the genre that made him a household name had flourished nearly two decades beforehand with only his second feature, the unfinished but highly spirited (the spirit being an angel of death in this case) High Plains Drifter, a counter-myth that saw in the Wild West something more akin to an Italian giallo. More fully formed was the sublime The Outlaw Josey Wales, an often misread work of mythic Western nihilism so full-throated in its interrogation of Western archetypes that no one seems to understand it to this day. 
An uncompromising chemical reaction between Ozu-esque balance, ghostly Mizugochian afterglow, and the tremors of Kaneto Shindo’s mid-’60s horror social disturbances, Shohei Imamura’s 1989 release Black Rain revises cinematic assumptions about trauma away from fiery holocaust to a more hauntingly ashen storm hovering overhead for the duration of life itself. Hiroshima isn’t a Godzilla-like destructive catalyst in Black Rain, but a distantly raging existential void within which one’s sense of being and becoming are threatened completely. The world is not only out for vengeance, but it becomes unknowable; time folds in on itself, and your life becomes a separable ghost floating away from you. Not to be confused with the lightweight Ridley Scott film of the same name from the same year, Black Rain envisions catastrophe as a perpetual, everlasting terror. Moments of shock and awe – the in-the-flesh horror of destruction we take to be the prime of the bombing – would be, if anything, a respite from the cold nothingness of life living in the emptiness of the bomb’s wake. 
The Long Take 