When Ingmar Bergman’s “Shame” premiered in 1968, the critic Renata Adler was quick to offer an interpretation. Reviewing the film in The New York Times, she asserted that “the shame of the title is God’s.” Indeed, throughout his career, Bergman elucidated existential questions of faith and fate. Adler’s analysis, however, misses what is for me the…
My grandmother had the fortune of living in Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood, moving to the City of Angels as a child in 1949 and living there ever since. Working at the star-studded Riviera Country Club as a professional ice skater and dancer, she had regular interactions with the social elite of…
After what seemed like a few centuries, the final season of “Game of Thrones” has descended to us from the heavens. Predictably, the HBO streaming service crashed, which led the watch party in my dorm to lament loudly at the projector. It’s a little strange to sit here at the beginning of the end of…
Toward the end of Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir, the detective Dave Bannion suddenly realizes that he has been double-crossed. The widow of a slain policeman reveals that she was complicit in her husband’s murder. In a rage, Bannion pushes her into the mantlepiece and puts his coarse hands around her neck. “With you dead,” he…
It has been ten years since the premiere of Pixar’s “Up,” and I’m feeling old. Putting aside my personal age-related crises, however, this has always been a special movie for me. I was charmed when I first saw it in theaters, falling in love with the imaginative concept of an elderly man tying balloons to…
Even before they take a consequential detour, the characters in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film have difficulty making their dreams come true. Al Roberts aspires to play piano at Carnegie Hall, but he has been stuck serenading seedy patrons of the Break o’ Dawn Club for years. His girlfriend, Sue, wants to be a Hollywood…
Because many retirees live there, some cynics have called Florida “God’s waiting room.” In his 1971 film, director Luchino Visconti proposes another candidate for the title—Venice. Visconti’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella centers around the composer Gustav von Aschenbach, who arrives in the Italian metropolis after a disastrous concert. Yet, his stay proves far from…
“French dancers gather in a remote, empty school building to rehearse on a wintry night. The all-night celebration morphs into a hallucinatory nightmare when they learn their sangria is laced with LSD,” reads IMDB’s plot summary of French filmmaker Gaspar Noé’s latest cinematic creation, “Climax.” What this plot summary, and any summary of the film…
