Archive for March, 2013
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
Infidelity was one of the many bleak themes that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman dwelled on within his films and his early film Smiles of a Summer Night is one that greatly emphasizes that. Smiles of a Summer Night, Bergman’s witty sex comedy, came at a time in which Bergman’s marriage, and love affair was deteriorating, and he was extremely […]
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Shoot the Piano Player (1960)
Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player is one of Truffaut’s most entertaining and affectionate tributes to the low-budget pulp crime genre, and of the comic films of Chaplin Chaplin and The Marx Brothers that he grew up adoring. It tells the simple story about a classical pianist, who tries to run away from his past after his wife’s tragic suicide, and […]
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Exterminating Angel, The (1962)
Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel is a cynical and macabre satire on the slow and deteriorating breakdown of human civilization, as Bunuel takes several wealthy bourgeois guests and purposely traps them all in an over populated room, which is similar to using mice to conduct a social experiment. At first these guests stay civilized, level-headed and continue using […]
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Mirror, The (1975)
The great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s transcendent autobiographical poem The Mirror is a film that blends the themes of childhood memories, dreams, emotional abandonment and loss of innocence with slight touches of documentary footage which can be looked at as a political commentary on Russian history and of its people. The film shifts from three different timelines […]
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Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
If a viewer is not used to the films of French director Jean-Luc Godard, than Pierrot le fou can be an extremely frustrating experience. Like other great artists like Bergman, Fellini, Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer and Tarkovsky, once you get used to the world that Godard has created for you, you end up appreciating and enjoying his films much more. And […]
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