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Celebrating Lance Hammer, An Extraordinary New American Director

Still another extraordinary new American director comes along--the third in just a few months. After Courtney Hunt with Frozen River and Chris Eska with Autumn Evening, here is Lance Hammer with Ballast. Though these three directors have little in ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  11 Oct 2008

Films Worth Seeing

Ballast. Set in the Mississippi Delta, this beautiful film deals with three people, all black, a taciturn country storekeeper, the angry woman who has had a child by his twin brother, now dead, and the child, a boy of twelve. Lance Hammer conceived ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  3 Oct 2008

Postwar Intrigue In France, And Woody Allen's Romantic Fabrications In Barcelona

Two young American women, Vicky and Cristina, go to spend a summer in Barcelona. Dining one night in a restaurant, they see a good-looking man across the room. Soon the man, a Spanish painter fluent in English, comes over to their table, says that he ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  20 Sep 2008

Why Does Place Matter In The Movies?

Place, the place where a story is set, can figure powerfully in our encounter with a film--perhaps even more in our memory of it. Think of what Manhattan did for some of Sidney Lumet's films, or Arizona for some of John Ford's, or that Swedish island ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  13 Sep 2008

Two Wonderful Achievements In Summer Film

Jiri Menzel is back. This Czech director made a considerable splash in 1967 with Closely Watched Trains, but although he has been busy since then, his later work has not had comparable impact. Now comes I Served the King of England, and strangely, the ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  6 Sep 2008

Films Worth Seeing

Frozen River. A new director, Courtney Hunt, and an experienced actress, Melissa Leo, present a well-crafted and absorbing story set on the frozen St. Lawrence River. Leo plays a woman who smuggles aliens in her car across the river into New York to ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  23 Aug 2008

Violence In Silken Lives; The Man Who Danced Between The Towers

On August 7, 1974, a man walked across a tightrope stretched between the roofs of two Manhattan skyscrapers. The buildings were the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The funambulist was a Frenchman named Philippe Petit, to whom the feat was much ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  16 Aug 2008

Living Vicariously Through A Gay, British Gangster

The base, the very source, of many documentaries is not often acknowledged-- the confidence that the people in the film have in the director. In A Very British Gangster, a criminal named Dominic Noonan, notorious in the extreme, talks on camera about ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  2 Aug 2008

Films Worth Seeing

Chris and Don. An exceptionally moving documentary about Christopher Isherwood and his much younger artist-lover Don Bachardy who survives him, who lives still in their California house -- still with him, figuratively. The film is pleasantly ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  21 Jul 2008

The Purpose Of Sex; The Life Of Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

The French director Catherine Breillat uses plentiful sex in her films. This is notable not for its candor, a quality that is nowadays general, but for its cunning purpose. Her easy, open attitude toward sex makes the viewer wonder (this seems to be ...

From STANLEY KAUFFMANN, The New Republic,  19 Jul 2008

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