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MICHAEL ATKINSON
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A bad dream trapped in amber
Like a bad dream trapped in amber, Terence Davies's studied film adaptation of Terence Rattigan's famous 1952 play is both spectrally beautiful and frozen in self-regard.
Oliver Laxe's jaunt lands in a semi-rural Moroccan school for orphans
A sublime meta-fictional trifle that evokes Abbas Kiarostami's '90s mirror-films of children, Oliver Laxe's jaunt lands in a semi-rural Moroccan school for orphans.
Amateur avant-garde hijinks
Made as a communal experiment, the film is an avalanche of amateur avant-garde hijinks, closer to Brakhage and Markopoulos than to Hollywood.
Rod Lurie's new version of the Peckinpah classic
Remaking, polishing, and in effect housebreaking what should've remained untamed and feral, Rod Lurie's new version of the Peckinpah classic follows the original's story beats closely, and so the devil is in the details.
Rich in mysteries
An investigative doc brimming with cultural resonance and historical savvy, Henry Corra's film has ahold of a pungent story — that of the titular black Texan fella who vanished in Vietnam 40 years ago.
Luis' world
Openly, contentedly delighted with how our own dreams can appall us, and how close movies are to that appalling dreaminess, Luis Buñuel — the subject of an extensive survey at the HFA this month — may have been the greatest filmmaker of the medium's first century.
Sleight of hand
Sylvain Chomet and Jacques Tati work their magic.
'SF-1970' at the Harvard Film Archive
Science-fiction films have been with us since Edison’s 1910 version of Frankenstein , but they bloomed in the ’Nam era, nourished by a volatile cocktail of cultural ingredients.
Philippe Grandrieux's loaded minimalism
An acquired taste in French cinema, Philippe Grandrieux is an abstractionist who does narrative features, a post-punk artiste as comfortable making Marilyn Manson music videos as he is war-zone documentaries. But his three major features — which the Harvard Film Archive is screening this weekend and next — revel in a dangerous minimalism.
Boys will be boys
In its own way an ideal holiday blockbuster for the moderately educated, the new light-footed overhaul of Sherlock Holmes is three parts self-satisfied mixer to one part hard storytelling, and if anything, the film's popular trailers should have deterred you from expecting strong drink.
A full-bore "Jewish" cinematic feast
Andrew Jacobs's documentary is a poignant portrait of a Jewish summer community in the Catskills (one of a few where once there'd been hundreds) peopled almost entirely by elderly concentration-camp survivors.
William Friedkin, the New Hollywood’s most daring pulp-realist provocateur.
However we may still praise, and therefore bury, the American New Wave, we do still run the genuine risk of slipping down the wormhole slicked by present-moment techno obsessions and amnesiac entertainment-media narcissism.
History lesson
An ambitious, whole-hog, four-hour-plus bio-pic of Che Guevara, c'mon.
Karen Shakhnazarov at the MFA
Karen Shakhnazarov at the MFA
The 20th Boston Jewish Film Festival reaches deep and far
Now in its 20th incarnation, the Boston Jewish Film Festival is almost the oldest three-ring circus of its kind (San Francisco’s annual program got there first by nine years), and in that span we’ve seen the elusive idea of “Jewish film” become an institution.
‘Envisioning Russia’ at the MFA
Because Mosfilm, the subject of the Museum of Fine Arts’ “Envisioning Russia” retrospective, was the Soviet state production studio, any cross-section of its history lays out the entirety of Soviet film history.
The HFA’s ‘Unseen Noir’ unveils America’s post-war gloom
Welcome to the dark territories again, the republic of bitterness and bile known as noir.
Jewishfilm.2008 explores the frontiers
Virtually every major city in this country hosts at least one “Jewish Film Festival” each year (even Baton Rouge and Dayton).
Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz at the ICA
Fassbinderians rejoice — your crucifixion, your tribulative martyrdom, has arrived.
Manoel de Oliveira at the HFA
Manoel de Oliveira occupies a unique seat on the global film culture’s board of directors.
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