Only the title of Jean-Luc Godard’s new film is casual and innocent; Weekend is the most powerful mystical movie since The Seventh Seal and Fires on the Plain and passages of Kurosawa. We are hardly aware of the magnitude of the author-director’s conception until after we are caught up in the comedy of horror, which keeps going further and becoming more nearly inescapable, like Journey to the End of the Night.
By taking a book by an author who is at the center of the craze for the supernatural, and turning it into a refusal of and subtle comment on that loopy cultural phenomenon, Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level
Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise” is a satire of new political youth, but a satire from within, based on observation, and a satire that loves its targets more than it loves anything else — that, perhaps, can see beauty and hope only in its targets.
When I read three years ago that Vittorio Storaro had been chosen as the cinematographer for Apocalypse Now, I was shocked. Storaro, the lush Vogue-style photographer of Last Tango in Paris and The Conformist, for a picture that was being billed as the definitive epic about Vietnam!
2001: Odissea nello spazio abbraccia un arco di oltre un milione d’anni, dall’alba dell’uomo al primo volo verso Giove. Kubrick ha avuto al fianco Arthur C. Clarke, un autore di fantascienza che è anche scienziato, e gli ha chiesto di guidarlo attraverso quelle che una felice formula editoriale ha definito «le meraviglie del possibile».
Siamo nel tormentato medioevo giapponese: la guerra civile infuria seminando lutti e miseria. In una capanna nascosta da un fitto canneto, tra la palude e il fiume, una donna anziana e una giovane, suocera e nuora, aspettano che torni il loro uomo. Per sopravvivere, tendono agguati a sperduti «samurai», li uccidono, li depredano, li gettano in un pozzo, vendono le spoglie a un mercante.
by Dwight Macdonald With this comédie noire Stanley Kubrick clinches his title—one I conceded him years ago—to Best of Show among our younger directors and
by Dwight Macdonald Lolita is a good movie which might have been much better. For the title role, Stanley Kubrick discovered a teen-age television actress
Il Dottor Zivago è stato tradito da un film senza poesia e guastato dal gusto materialistico delle grandi sensazioni, degli scontri propagandistici senza retroterra spirituale
Il film di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Uccellacci e uccellini ha un impianto allegorico, o per meglio dire da parabola. Il regista stesso parla di una «operetta poetica nella lingua della prosa» (come intenzione) dalla struttura magica e malinconica di favola. In altri momenti definisce il suo racconto «ideo-comico»
2001: Odissea nello spazio non somiglia a nessun film di fantascienza o di fantapolitica finora realizzato. Perché non è un film di fantascienza in nessun senso del termine, ma semplicemente un discorso sull’uomo, l’uomo di sempre.
Eyes Wide Shut is the work of an artist who long ago stopped paying attention to the world around him. If you are someone who cares about film culture, you will want to see it anyway, perhaps more than once. Respect for the rest of Kubrick’s work would demand no less.
Lolita is a film that runs steadily downhill at too slow a pace for a needless two and a half hours.
The great merit of Dr. Strangelove is its bad taste. It is silly to argue that we have the right to say anything we want but that to exercise this right is the height of irresponsibility. Responsible art is dead art, and a sane (no pun intended) film on the bomb would have been a deadly bore.
Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is one of the most cogent, comic, and cruel movies to come along in many a year, and one of the best.
The General, made in 1927, best combines the subtle character of Keaton with material that is perfect for his style.
by Bosley Crowther In discussing The Shop on Main Street, I spoke of the characteristic style of many of the Czechoslovakian films of the 1960s
by Bosley Crowther In light of the phenomenal popularity of George Lukas’ 1977 Star Wars, which seems to have done for science fiction movies what
Like Mailer, Dylan is an artist who intended to do something in advance of conventional movies—more poetic, more ‘true’—yet “Renaldo and Clara,” like Mailer’s “Wild 90,” “Beyond the Law” and “Maidstone,” is marked by an absence of artistic intelligence. The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan.
I submit that, if we are going to be moved to thought and action by The Deer Hunter, it ought to be by the implications of its true subject: the limitations for our society of the traditions of male mystique, the hobbling by sentimentality of a community that, after all the horror, still wants the beeriness of “God Bless America” instead of a moral rigor and growth that might help this country.
Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 is a memory movie, written, directed and acted with such uncommon good humor that I don’t think you’ll be put off by its sweet soft-focus, at least until you start analyzing it afterwards.