The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups, 1959) Director: Francois Truffaut By Roderick Heath The 400 Blows, Francois Truffaut’s debut film, is a work around which implicit ironies swirl. It looks as much backwards as it does forwards, to Truffaut’s youthful experiences, and the artworks and ideals he considered vital, as well as attempting to articulate a fresh sense of what the cinema could and ought to be capable of. The movie made an immediate impact, proved a vanguard for the Nouvelle Vag... Read Full Story

Fantastic Planet (La planète sauvage, 1973) Director/Coscreenwriter: Réne Laloux De Profundis (2007) Director/Screenwriter: Miguelanxo Prado By Marilyn Ferdinand The realists and the impressionists are at it again. No, we’re not in 19th century France or Nazi Germany. Our battle is in the very commercial realm of animated film. Here’s part of a comment from a Serbian IMDb reader about the recent Spanish film De Profundis: “A pretentious must-not see. This is not an animated movie. Unles... Read Full Story

Batman (1989) Director: Tim Burton By Roderick Heath Yeah, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years, either. And it’s been at least 15 since I last saw Tim Burton’s grandiose redesign of the classic comic strip and the campy TV show derived from it. I remember the hype around its release exceptionally well, because it was impossible to get away from. In commercial terms, as other writers have noted lately, Batman altered how Hollywood conceived and sold its blockbusters. Whilst ’80s cinema had ... Read Full Story

2009 Polish Film Festival in America Operation Danube (Operace Dunaj, 2009) Director: Janek Glomb By Marilyn Ferdinand There’s a subgenre of war film that likes to emphasize the absurdity of war by showing how people who have no quarrel with each other and exist in the backwaters of battle react, not like dehumanized enemies, but rather as quirky individuals who dare to think for themselves. Mediterraneo, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, and even MASH turn soldiers into ... Read Full Story

Pretty in Pink (1986) Director: Howard Deutch By Roderick Heath The death of Michael Jackson and John Hughes within a few weeks of each other had me thinking a lot about the 1980s. I never had much time for ’80s youth pics when I was an ’80s youth, and I watched most of Hughes’s later cornball films, like the intolerable Plains, Trains, and Automobiles (1987), without digging them in the least: they were broad, sticky, and slick in the wrong way. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1985) was funny... Read Full Story

2009 Polish Film Festival in America Earthly Paradise (Droga do Raju, 2008) Director/Co-Screenwriter: Gerwazy Reguła By Marilyn Ferdinand Once upon a time, there was a lady who was SO good that everywhere she went, the sun followed her and shined its light so strongly that nobody and nothing ever cast a shadow. Bad things happened, sometimes even to the good lady, but the sun, doing its job, was so bright, that no shadows could ever fall on the lady. And the lady had such a cute smile th... Read Full Story

The Hurt Locker (2008) Director: Kathryn Bigelow By Roderick Heath Here There Be Spoilers. “War is a drug,” The Hurt Locker’s foreword assays, and the film follows this thesis to the bitter end. An Iraq War film in all its sundry details and yet, in its way, apolitical and even timeless, The Hurt Locker is more about the dark, corrosive addictiveness of action, even when you know it’s doing you no good. In the midst of a landscape that deals out disaster almost arbitrarily, its core group ... Read Full Story

2009 Polish Film Festival in America The Forest (Las, 2009) Director/Screenwriter: Piotr Dumała By Marilyn Ferdinand It is not Kieślowski, Wajda, or Pasikowski who are the most sought-after, loved, and welcome of Polish filmmakers at almost all of the world’s festivals. It is Piotr Dumała. The renown of premier animator Piotr Dumała may not have reached many English-speaking countries, but it should. My first film of the PFFAmerica, and my first Dumała film, was a deep—very deep—experien... Read Full Story

CQ (2001) Director/Screenwriter: Roman Coppola By Roderick Heath Damn Francis Ford Coppola and his talented family! Even if, Nicholas Cage excluded (sometimes), they’re entirely preferable behind the camera to in front of it, they’ve still managed to brew many a sour grape into critical wine. Daughter Sofia, of course, survived being skinned alive a trifle excessively for her acting in The Godfather Part III (1990) to become, to my mind, the most interesting American director under 40 toda... Read Full Story

Skhizein (2008) Director/Screenwriter/Animator: Jérémy Clapin By Marilyn Ferdinand To be “beside oneself” is a turn of phrase we’ve all heard or used at one time or another. It usually refers to someone experiencing something very emotionally charged. Of course, the part of that phrase that most people don’t think much about is that the emotion literally drives one out of one’s body. If you’ve ever witnessed a car wreck or been threatened with serious physical harm, as I have, you’ll be ... Read Full Story