Our introduction to the films of Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, La promesse (1996) is, like last week's Le Havre, a story of African migrants in Europe. But where Aki Kaurismäki took a more magical approach, the Dardenne's hew much closer to the intense realism of, say, Ken Loach. The brothers' history in documentary perhaps make it…

Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre (2011) is a hard movie to categorize. It's the dramatic tale of solidarity and sanctuary, of a community setting aside petty differences to protect a vulnerable migrant. But it's not social realism; It's more magical than that. Some critics call it fairy tale-esque, Pat calls it a children's story, none of them to dismiss …

Steven Soderbergh's film adaptation of Spalding Gray's monologue about avoiding an eye surgery, Gray's Anatomy (1996) girds Gray's George Carlin-esque delivery in some dynamic visuals and inter-cuts them with stark black and white testimonials of people recounting there own terrible eye injuries. Perhaps not for the squeamish, but it's still an eng…

Many documentaries are introductions to their topics, assuming the audience has limited or even no knowledge of the subject. Steven Soderbergh's 2010 documentary about his late friend monologuist Spalding Gray, And Everything is Going Fine, is not. Soderbergh himself says it's for people who are already familiar with Gray. Since this is our introdu…

Add Danny Boyle to the long list of British directors who claim their work is apolitical, seemingly only to distance themselves from Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But it doesn't take the death of the author to find a political read of his brutal debut feature Shallow Grave (1994), a film about the corrupting influence of money on relationships, about h…

In 1925 Charlie Chaplin released the highest grossing silent film of all time, The Gold Rush, a tale of desperate men fighting the harsh elements to chase the American Dream: getting rich through extractive capitalism. Chaplin is certainly capable of political film (see The Great Dictator or Modern Times) but also the Tramp is a political character…

Ingmar Bergman's Summer with Monika (1953) was very popular in the US, due in large part to distributor Kroger Babb's cutting over half an hour and adding a lot of nudity to it. Criterion doesn't give us Babb's cut, but I guess they gotta save something for the bluray upgrade. It's an interesting enough early Bergman, with the director moving throu…

Our earliest Ingmar Bergman film yet, Summer Interlude (1951) is a story of young love and internalized trauma. It also may be one of the earliest films we've seen where a manipulative groomer's actions are actually shown to be bad? In any case, it's Bergman before he's really BERGMAN, but well on his way to it; taking steps to assemble the troupe …

Abbas Kiarostami is a man who understands the intimacy of a conversation in the front seat of a car. While Taste of Cherry (1997), which we watch way back at Spine 45 is the pinnacle of that truth, Certified Copy (2010) has plenty of driving and talking before it settles into sight seeing and talking. To keep things interesting, Certified Copy is a…

Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting and Spike Jonze's directorial debuts, Being John Malkovich is a delightfully weird story of identity. Lotte (Cameron Diaz)'s storyline is particularly compelling, with Lotte experiencing gender euphoria as Malkovich, whereas our other main characters want to use Malkovich for patriarchal power, through fame or immort…

Mario Monicelli's The Organizer's title, like De Sica's Bicycle Thieves 15 years before it, had its title senselessly singularized for English release. The original title I compagni means "The Comrades" and is a bit more indicative of the ensemble organizing that is going on here. The story of a late 19th century textile mill strike, The Organizer …

In 1973 Robert M. Young made Children of the Fields, a short documentary about a family of Polo Galindo, migrant farm workers in the Southwest US including his young children living, a transient life as exploited laborers. Galindo opened Young's eyes not only to his and his family's plight, but to the struggles of an even lower rung: undocumented m…

Written by Colin Higgins and directed by Hal Ashby, scored by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), Harold and Maude is a wonderful piece of counter-culture from early New Hollywood, and honestly, a better ode to freedom than most of what came out of the "America Lost and Found: The BBS Story" boxset of foundational New Hollywood works we watched a few months…

We finish up A Hollis Frampton Odyssey this week, covering work from his Magellan cycle, a massive project Frampton was working on when he died. While previously discussed works like (nostalgia) show Frampton's ironic detachment, Magellan melds the history of film and Frampton's life story in a way that feels sentimental. These works also often see…

We continue through A Hollis Frampton Odyssey and it feels a bit like being lost at sea this week. We cover 3 films from his Hapax Legomena series: (nostalgia), Poetic Justice, and Critical Mass. Each originally released in 1972, the three shorts are perhaps more conceptually interesting to us than they are in execution. Well, not Critical Mass, wh…

Criterion once again brings us a boxset of avant-garde film, this time from American filmmaker Hollis Frampton. A Hollis Frampton Odyssey contains 20 or so shorts of varying length, adding up to 266 minutes of material that we'll be covering over the next three weeks. In this week's episode we cover what Criterion deems Frampton's "Early Films", al…

Ronald Neames says that after This Happy Breed he and the rest of Cineguild were tired of making war-time films, and were pretty sure audiences were tired of propaganda. But they weren't tired of working with Noel Coward, despite the fact that with each movie in Criterion's David Lean Directs Noel Coward boxset we get new stories of Coward disagree…