Movies

Shakespearian plays have been adapted for the screen time and time again.   “Othello”, “Hamlet”, “Romeo and Juliet”, “The Tempest”, the list goes on an on and the familiarity for a viewer with these stories is established before they ever enter the theatre.  “Coriolanus” is a lesser know, and lesser adapted, play Shakespeare wrote.  Well-known actor […]

This is most definitely a film, a wonderful, essential conjuring of something from nothing, a necessity for the film-maker, and the selfless defiance of a repressive regime. The Iranian government has banned director Jafar Panahi from film-making or from leaving the country for twenty years, and at the time of this film’s making, he was […]

An exquisite salmagundi of moral grey shades, A Separation explicitly hands off judgment to the audience in the opening scene, as Simin and Nader sit before a judge and address directly to camera their cases for and against divorce. She wants to emigrate, to raise their daughter, Temeh, away from the difficulties and repressions of […]

In an alternate universe, a Turin Horse will become the name for a movie that turns out to have nothing to do with its title. Slow-cinema maestro Béla Tarr’s latest (last?) opens with a blank-screen voiceover relating the semi-apocryphal story of Nietzsche’s madness-inducing encounter with a mistreated carthorse, and declares that “of the horse, we […]