Note: I detail specific scenes from the film. These are not necessarily spoilers, or even major plot point reveals. However, this post is a deeper dive. If you like watching clean slate, you might want to read this after the fact. Just saying... 🙂 Shoplifters is not director Hirokazu Kore-eda's first foray into the world of families.… Continue reading Shoplifters: family, love, and outside forces
Close-Up (Nemā-ye Nazdīk) follows an Iranian man, Hossain Sabzian, who is accused of fraud for assuming the identity of the famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. He meets a woman on a bus and, after she notices him reading the script for Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist, he says he is the director and eventually, after talking with… Continue reading Three Notes on Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up
Unlike many of Luis Buñuel’s films, Tristana is shockingly mild in its surrealism, which is what perhaps makes the film far more mysterious as you watch it. It is, in fact, quite a simple story at first glance. A woman dies leaving her daughter in the care of a gentleman, Don Lope, who in turn… Continue reading Tristana, reflections
From the first scene, a banal drive across a beautiful Italian landscape, the attitudes are already set. You see Katherine (Ingrid Bergman) paying drastic attention to the road, busy at the wheel of the car, while her husband Alex (George Sanders) nearly falls asleep, disassociated from the foreign land around him, and already complaining about… Continue reading Journey to Italy, reflections
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