The bulk of “The Boy Behind the Door” finds Bobby sneaking inside and—literally, quite usually—hiding behind one door or another as he skulks about, trying to find his friend while outwitting his captors. As working day turns to night as well as creaky house grows darker, the administrators and cinematographer Julian Estrada use dramatic streaks of light to illuminate ominous hallways and cramped quarters. They also use silence effectively, prompting us to hold our breath just like the children to avoid being found.
Underneath the cultural kitsch of it all — the screaming teenage fans, the “king with the world” egomania, the instantly universal language of “I want you to attract me like amongst your French girls” — “Titanic” is as personal and cohesive as any film a fraction of its size. That intimacy starts with Cameron’s individual obsession with the Ship of Dreams (which he naturally cast to play itself in a movie that ebbs between fiction and reality with the same bittersweet confidence that it flows between past and present), and continues with every facet of a script that revitalizes its basic story of star-crossed lovers into something legendary.
star Christopher Plummer gained an Oscar for his performance in this moving drama about a widowed father who finds love again after coming out in his 70s.
Established inside of a hermetic setting — there are no glimpses of daylight in the slightest degree in this most indoors of movies — or, fairly, four luxurious brothels in 1884 Shanghai, the film builds refined progressions of character through comprehensive dialogue scenes, in which courtesans, attendants, and clients focus on their relationships, what they feel they’re owed, and what they’re hoping for.
The movie was influenced by a true story in Iran and stars the actual family members who went through it. Mere days after the news item broke, Makhmalbaf turned her camera within the family and began to record them, directing them to reenact selected scenes according to a script. The moral concerns raised by such a technique are complex.
Dash’s elemental way, the non-linear framework of her narrative, as well as sensuous pull of Arthur Jafa’s cinematography Blend to make a rare film of raw beauty — a single that didn’t ascribe to Hollywood’s idea of Black people or their cinema.
The ingloriousness of war, and the basis of pain that would be passed down the generations like a cursed heirloom, could be seen even inside dogfart the most unadorned of images. Devoid of even the tiniest little bit of hope or humor, “Lessons of Darkness” offers the most chilling and powerful condemnation of humanity inside a long career that has alway looked at us askance. —LL
Davis renders interval piece scenes for a Oscar Micheaux-impressed black-and-white silent film replete with inclusive intertitles and archival photographs. One particular particularly heart-warming scene finds Arthur and Malindy seeking hitbdsm refuge by watching a movie inside of a theater. It’s quick, but exudes Black Pleasure by granting a rare historical nod recognizing how Black people from the earlier experienced more than crushing hardships.
Of each of the gin joints in all of the towns in many of the world, he had to turn into swine. Still the most purely enjoyable movie that anime sex Hayao Miyazaki has ever made, “Porco Rosso” splits the primary difference between “Casablanca” and “Bojack Horseman” to tell the bittersweet story of a World War I fighter pilot who survived the dogfight that killed the remainder of his squadron, and is also compelled to spend the rest of his days with the head of the pig, hunting bounties over the sparkling blue waters of the Adriatic Sea while pining for that beautiful operator on the community hotel (who happens being his useless wingman’s former big asses wife).
The dark has never been darker than it's in “Lost Highway.” In actual fact, “inky” isn’t a strong enough descriptor with the starless desert nights and shadowy corners buzzing with staticky menace that make Lynch’s first Formal collaboration with novelist Barry Gifford (“Wild At Heart”) the most terrifying movie in his filmography. This is actually a “ghastly” black. An “antimatter” black. A black where monsters live.
Adapted from the László Krasznahorkai novel in the same name and maintaining the book’s dance-motivated chronology, Béla Tarr’s seven-hour “Sátántangó” tells a Möbius strip-like story about the collapse of the farming collective in post-communist Hungary, news of which inspires a mystical charismatic vulture of a man named Irimiás — played by composer Mihály Vig — to “return from the useless” and prey about the desolation he finds among the desperate and easily manipulated townsfolk.
There’s a purity to your poetic realism of Moodysson’s filmmaking, which frequently ignores the reduced-price range constraints of shooting at night. Grittiness becomes quite beautiful in his hands, creating a rare and visceral consolation for his young cast along with the lives they so naturally youporm inhabit for Moodysson’s camera. —CO
“Raise the Red Lantern” challenged staid perceptions of Chinese cinema from the West, and sky-rocketed actress Gong Li to international stardom. At home, however, the film was criticized for trying to appeal to foreigners, and even banned from screening in theaters (it had been later permitted to air on television).
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play the moms of two teenagers whose happy home life is thrown off-balance when their long-back nameless sperm donor crashes the party.