Wings of Desire starts with a man jotting down the story of a universal child who didn’t know it was a child. Titles come up as if they were scratched up on a blackboard. An eye looks up into the sky and the camera fades into a slowly moving aerial shot from above the tenements of Berlin. An angel with fading wings…
Stitched loosely together from the pages of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game and a few borrowed conventions from film noir, Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a stylish and enigmatic thriller that acts as a superb demonstration of how atmospheric elements can be more vital than story. Character…
Tokyo-Ga (1985), Wim Wenders’ documentary of his trip to Japan in search of the world as seen in the films of famed director Yasujirô Ozu, was described by Vincent Canby on its American premiere as a “small but important film.” Thirty years on, with greater access to Ozu’s films and the expansion of Wenders’ own…
Announcing its cinematic intentions in the first frames, the third and final installment of Wim Wenders’ “Road Movie Trilogy” (a series of films that started with Alice in the Cities in 1974 and continued with The Wrong Move in 1975) Kings of the Road (1976) is the work of a master filmmaker who chooses not only to work in black and…
Wim Wenders’ 1972 German-language film The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick was based upon the Peter Handke novel of the same name. It is a steady film that follows a seemingly uninteresting, lonely man who commits a crime and reacts with equal disinterest, thinking only of himself at all times, eventually appearing to…
There are obvious flaws with Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups. Many people have, and will continue to look negatively upon this film. What they forget, though, is that this film isn’t targeted towards a broad audience - Knight of Cups is reserved for the narrow category among people, general public and cinephiles alike…
Although this is the first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film I’ve been treated to, his name does come with a reputation of expecting the unexpected. The truth is Cemetery Of Splendour is cinematic poetry in storytelling.
“Fearful is the last place of injur’d innocence,” goes the Goethe quote on which The King’s Surrender opts to open, an amusingly ambitious announcement of dramatic intent for a film that feels like a German The Sweeney. This is wholly naff nonsense that ought to know better, a perfectly passable tense thriller whose damaging drawback is never admitting it’s…
Mr. Kaplan, Uruguay’s 2015 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar submission from writer/director Álvaro Brechner, follows a 76-year old Jewish man’s existential struggles with old age. In late 1930s Poland, his family sent him alone to South America to avoid religious persecution. His family promised to meet him there, although perhaps they knew they never…
With Clouds of Sils Maria, the Official Competition featured another film that can be described as a backstage drama, looking behind the scenes of the film business through the eyes of the aging Hollywood actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant Val (Kristen Stewart). Twenty years after her breakthrough role in “Maloja Snake”, a film based on a…