Reviews

This was Sidney Toler's last film as detective Charlie Chan, the last in a series of twenty-two, produced between 1938 and 1946.

The physical fragility of the actor is visible, as he appears in fewer scenes, moves slowly and even demonstrates a relative verbal economy that is not characteristic of the character. There is, for example, not a single "correction please" in Toler's farewell to the character. A film where we have more "number 2 Son" and Birmingham than Chan.

The plot is what you would expect from a banal television police series and the value of this work is above all historical and sentimental, for fans of the character.

Bud Abbott and Lou Costello formed a successful comedian duo in the 1940s, especially in the United States, following traditional parameters of circus and vaudeville comedy, such as the rich clown (Abbott) and poor clown (Costello).

The duo's best moments were certainly the equivocal dialogues, often based on homophones, which they explored to the point of exhaustion. In this film there is one of those dialogues, at the dinner that they don't intend to pay for, which is probably the highest and most entertaining point of the film.

The drawback of this type of dialogue is its difficult translation, which perhaps explains the duo's lower popularity abroad, when compared to other successful duos, such as Laurel & Hardy or Martin & Lewis.

The problem is that the argument of this film is very weak, it insistently resorts to physical comedy, on the part of Costello, and the narrative construction, which is not very consistent, ends up serving as a mere pretext for the succession of popular and somewhat cheap, vaudeville comedy duets , from the duo.

It certainly won't be one of the duo's best films, not even for Abbott and Costello fans. For others, it is just another consumer product, produced in Hollywood, for undemanding moviegoers.

The Fear, a 1966 Greek film written and directed by Kostas Manoussakis and with beautiful cinematography by Nikos Gardelis, is a powerful parable about human bestiality.

Humanity, reduced to its most basic condition, is nothing more than animal instinct, hostage to its basest desires and interests.

Man, victim to fear, lives under pressure, due to his uncontrollable instincts and the terror of the imminent loss of his worldly and material interests.

Served by black and white cinematography, which highlights this human beast and its harsh habitat, with an unsettling soundtrack by Giannis Markopoulos, and some memorable performances, especially by Anestis Vlahos, this is a film that will not be forgotten and that the most cynics will not hesitate to call it a masterpiece.

Fassbinder ends this film with a quote from Thomas Mann that expresses his tiredness in representing the human species, without being part of it. This could well be the key to interpreting not only this film, but almost all of Fassbinder's work.

In a world divided between capitalist tyranny and socialist hypocrisy, there is no real place for Fassbinder and his troupe, representative of a generation that wants to be above bourgeois values, but finds no alternatives, falling into nihilism and depression.

In retrospect, we can believe that Fassbinder's discomfort stemmed, in large part, from the rejection of homosexuality, whether by fascist moralism or socialist progressivism. The sexual freedom of the sixties did not yet include homosexuality, and Fassbinder, using shock therapy in his films, was one of the staunchest critics of this hypocritical sexual revolution.

The film tells the story of a film production, which takes place in a haphazard manner, in a Sorrento painted in Francoist Spain, as a metaphor for a society and a revolution of mentalities, which is also slow to happen.

Meanwhile, Cuba Libres are drunk, in honor of the revolution.

A hermetic work, where fantasy and reality mix, in a surreal universe of a writer, locked in a strange beach house, almost a fortress, with his pregnant wife, while writing a literary work.

Both suffer injuries from a road accident. He has a deep feeling of guilt, marked by a scar on his forehead, which symbolizes a healthy madness, which he channels into literary creation. She, a loving muteness, the reverse of her husband's guilt, which she only overcomes at the end, with the birth of her son.

Meanwhile, like a demiurge of the small world that surrounds him, he plays the luck and destiny of his characters and of his own life and family.

Of course, with all the hermetic surrealism that dominates the film, everything could mean something completely different to other viewers.

It is certainly not Varda's most representative cinematographic language, nor is it her most inspired or influential film.

A surprising Finnish film from the end of the 60s, which proposes, in a science fiction environment that could have inspired Woody Allen's Sleeper, a reflection on the concept of democracy and the utopias it gave rise to, which kept the world divided and suspended at the time of the Cold War, which nevertheless caused episodes of enormous violence, permanently threatening the world with the total destruction of humanity.

The conclusion seems to be that totalitarian democracy annihilates the individual, and that only the imperfection of the democratic social struggle guarantees individual freedom, even if it generates violence and social confrontation.

However, totalitarianism inevitably imposes itself on the annihilation of the individual in the face of the collective interest.

An interesting reflection that well reflects the ambiguity of political thought at the time, which is still relevant, even in current times, when the Cold War has become history.

What is democracy after all? Are these regimes, in which we currently live, truly democratic?

Doesn't the ghost of totalitarianism remain suspended, waiting for the bankruptcy of social democracies, victors of the cold war?

Like José Afonso's vampires, this grandmother who eats everything, exhausting her family to death, would perhaps be, in 1979, when written and directed by Hector Oliveira, a metaphor for American capitalism and the Argentine ruling class, which, insatiable, consumed the country's resources to exhaustion, literally pushing its inhabitants to a miserable death.

There is always a grandmother in every political regime, in every country, in every family, so the metaphor remains timeless, capable of pleasing successive generations and different cultures.

A classic that, despite the years, remains lively and relevant.

Limelight is the film that marks the beginning of Chaplin's exile, after several years of persecution by American authorities, who accused him of communist sympathies.

Far from being a bitter and adversarial film, this cinematic response from Chaplin is a farewell of an old glory, full of panache, sweetness and poetry.

Chaplin says goodbye to Hollywood with a smile and a white glove slap, with the enormous elegance and critical sense with which he always acted throughout his career.

Interestingly, this film would give him the only competitive Oscar of his life, for the soundtrack (he would receive another, an honorary award, in 1972, for his entire career).

It wouldn't be Chaplin's last film, as he might have thought when he made it, but it is certainly among the best that has been done in cinematographic art, to this day.

One of the last films by the Marx brothers where, despite adding nothing relevant to their cinematic routine, they also don't clash, building a coherent work and where there is space for each of them to express their enormous humorous talent.

The theme of the hotel managed by the chaotic brothers is recurrent in their work (the four coconuts, a day at the races (here a sanatorium hotel), room service), and when it is not a hotel it is an opera or a circus company, a university or even an imaginary country called Sylvania. The important thing is to create chaos, where the healthy madness of the Marx brothers prevails, to the undeniable pleasure of the viewer.

This film is also a nice parody of the classic Casablanca, at the time at the peak of popularity.

A film that no Marx Brothers fan will want to miss.

Topper is a 1930s screwball comedy in the full sense of the term. The very fragility of the argument elevates it to the healthy madness that characterizes this type of comedy.

Nothing in this story makes much sense, but the truth is that the whole works as exceptional entertainment, with some of the most fun and charismatic actors of the time.

It's no wonder why it was a tremendous success and even led to two sequels, although without Cary Grant, who only appears in the first film and Constance Bennett who plays the first two but does not appear in the third film. The duo Roland Young and Billie Burke, however, complete the trilogy.

A film with the density of a sheet of paper, but still downright fun.

Rarely have the human condition, the permanent struggle between life and death and the search for knowledge, for a meaning to existence, been presented in such an eloquent and poetic way as in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal.

This is certainly why it is seen by many not only as the Swedish director's masterpiece, but as a pillar of 20th century cinema and culture.

The Seventh Seal is much more than a film, it is a work of art. A bold visual poem, beautiful but frightening at the same time, where each viewer is deeply confronted with their own mortality and the search for meaning in life.

It's not worth asking many questions when the answer is just one, and inevitably painted in black.

A portrait of misery and ignorance, in a Sardinia lost in its ancient traditions of isolation and distrust.

A shepherd finds himself unjustly involved in an escape of bandits, which resulted in the death of a police officer. His survival instinct pushes him to flee. He fears continental justice, the loss of his sheep, the prison that would prevent him from supporting his old mother and brother.

But it's a dead end. He manages to escape the police, but not the poverty and violence, which push him into a life as a fugitive, a criminal, condemned and persecuted by everyone.

A harsh and merciless vision of the isolation and ignorance, imposed by the law of silence, in the pastoral communities of Sardinia, filmed in the mountains in the center of the island, using only amateur actors, belonging to the local communities.

An excellent example of new cinema from the 1960s, at its best.

A story about the search for identity that can equally be seen as a metaphor for a country divided by a suspended but omnipresent war.

Freddie also lives suspended, not only between her biological and adoptive parents, but between East and West, between the present and the past, between war and peace.

She is the product of war and misery, despite having lived far from it all. Confronting the pain, shame and suffering associated with her birth and adoption imposes on her a need for reconciliation with her origins, with her identity lost and never found again.

But it is an impossible task. Life doesn't stop, the past cannot be redone. Freddie is condemned to live on the border, an outcast, lonely without integrating anywhere.

The Face (The Magician) is a curious incursion by Ingmar Bergman into the territory of the occult, fear, illusions and superstitions that still mark, in an indelible way, the human condition.

Despite the evidence, the tricks, the manifest mystification of occultism, there is always a doubt that hovers, an atavistic, or perhaps mystical, desire to believe that life is not just this, that reality is too absurd to be simply accepted and that It takes faith in something superior and supernatural to be able to survive, to overcome the banality of life.

In the absence of love, even the cheap tricks of some charlatan seem to be enough.

Bachelor Mother is one of those romantic comedies, written in the good tradition of farce, that delighted audiences in the 30s and 40s of the last century, and still do.

It may not be the most dynamic, the most hilarious, the most wildly romantic of the thirties' screwball comedies, but it is well written, well directed by screenwriter/director Garston Kanin and well acted by the always charismatic Ginger Rogers, the friendly heartthrob David Niven and the unavoidable Charles Coburn, a habitual and almost essential presence in these works that fill the collective imagination of successive generations of cinephiles.

Highly recommended.

A very curious film because, based on the 1929 work of Martin Luís Gusmán, it denounces the dirty struggle for power within the revolutionary army and in the intricacies of supposedly democratic politics in Mexico in the 1920s.

With fictional characters, Gusmán and Bracho put their finger on the wound of the struggle for power, not just in Mexico but in general. Even in current representative democracies, the ruling generals are replaced by other caudillos, but the principles and ethics are the same, an indignant struggle for power and wealth, where everything goes and the ends always justify the means.

Mexican political power was so well portrayed in the film that banned it for 30 years, with it only being released, abroad, in 1990.

A picture that shows politics in its true grotesque face.

The story of an artist, film director, divorced, who seeks, in a new woman, to rebuild a meaning for his life and work. A muse that inspires a new film at the same time that fills the obvious gap in his life.

Antonioni thus mixes reality and fiction in the protagonist's journey, in a challenge equally launched to the viewer, who slowly separates the waters between the work and its creative process.

It is an intelligent film in which the master returns to his favorite theme, the relationship between man and woman, although it is hardly comparable, in form and content, to the classics that elevated him to the status of star of the new Italian wave.

Marco Bellocchio directs a biographical film about a key character in the history of the fight against the Sicilian mafia during the 80s and 90s, Tommaso Buscetta, the so-called boss of two worlds who became the first repentant member of Cosa Nostra, whose collaboration with justice led to the arrest of hundreds of mafiosi and triggered a wave of repentants that practically dismantled the organization and the main Italian political parties at the time.

Far from being a hero, this Buscetta, who the film's title bluntly calls "the traitor", was a murderer, drug trafficker and member of a criminal organization who, when he found himself cornered by the justice system and abandoned by his supporters, decided to repent, tell everything and put himself in the service and under the protection of justice, living the rest of his life, approximately 16 years, at the expense of the State and under the North American witness protection program. All of this leads us to consider this status of repentance and the extent to which the ends justify the means in the fight against organized crime.

This is not about humanizing a sinister figure, because criminals are as human as other people. They are the result of the accumulation of circumstances that make human beings ambiguous, always oscillating between good and evil, between virtue and vice. Buscetta is not and does not consider himself a hero, just a survivor, who would like to die peacefully in his bed instead of being shot in the street, or in jail, despite all the mistakes he made in life.

If there is anything that this film adds to a theme as recurrent as that of the Sicilian Mafia, it is, in my opinion, the idea, rejected outright by Judge Falcone, but which Buscetta seems to believe until the last moment, that Cosa Nostra was an organization of honor and mutual aid, at some point in its history, which was perverted by the struggle for power and wealth. It is in this sense that, when faced with Riina, the capo dei capi, Buscetta accuses him of having been the one to kill the Mafia, with his ambition and thirst for power and revenge.

The truth is that, with or without the Mafia, organized crime continues to exist and proliferate, with close links to all forms of power in the world. There is no true power without organized crime to sustain it, it seems to be an inevitable conclusion.

In The Adventure Antonioni demonstrates how easy it is for people to disappear from our lives. It is not just death, or even death, that takes them, but oblivion.

Passions are like drunkenness for alcoholics, one can be cured by the next one. And life continues its daily adventure, made of an eternal becoming, where everything is ephemeral, empty, absurd.

In this film, which marks, like Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the beginning of the new Italian wave, a profound existentialism also emerges which, unlike Bergman's cinema, which paints the existential drama in black, fills it with futile and ephemeral vanity, the absurd comedy of life.

The Eclipse, from 1962, closes a golden trilogy begun by Antonioni with The Adventure, in 1960 and continued with The Night, in 1961.

These three films, without wanting to devalue the others, where there are works of undeniable value, are the epicenter of the new cinematic language, led by Antonioni, who so influenced the new wave, Italian and elsewhere, and catapulted the director to stardom.

It is a language that strives for restraint, based on the maxim that says, sometimes less is more. Silence is explored as a vehicle of communication. See the opening scene of this Eclipse, in which Monica Vitti and Francisco Rabal spend several minutes in silence, symbolizing the end of a relationship in which they had nothing more to say to each other.

At the center of the plot are always complex relationships, men and women who aspire to something, without knowing exactly what, but find themselves permanently drawn into the emptiness of everyday life. The absurd existentialism of a generation that, devoid of the fight for survival, which so marked the previous generation, that of war, now vegetates in the opulence of an Italy in full economic boom, without a true meaning to life. Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which in Antonioni's cinema is much more bitter than sweet, precisely because it is empty, it lacks values, objectives, designs. It's an absurd life for someone who doesn't know what they want in life and experiments, forever, without ever being satisfied with the result.

The beautiful black and white cinematography, in large format, and the minimal, abstract soundtrack, also contribute greatly to framing this beautiful but deserted universe, of an Italy rebuilt by the rules of a ferocious capitalism and a new idle bourgeoisie. Morally absent.

Quentin Dupieux is one of the most irreverent and original directors working today.

Said like that, it seems like a virtue and very occasionally it can be, but on most occasions his unquestionable irreverence and originality only leads to total and complete absurdity.

Note that I speak from the experience of someone who has seen four feature films and even a short film by Dupieux, each one more ridiculous than the last.

In Runner there is a killer tire that travels the North American roads in search of victims. In 100% Suede, a fur coat transforms a middle-aged man into a serial killer. In Mandibules, there are a pair of friends who find a giant fly and decide to train it, for inevitably disastrous ends. Finally, in this Smoking Makes You Cough, we have a group of Power Rangers, led by a giant, womanizing rat, like the head of the ninja turtles, fighting against insects and giant turtles, while telling gore stories to each other, in a spiritual retreat, with a talking barracuda participating in the gathering.

All of this is served using some of the most important French actors and actresses today.

If the objective is to scare the viewer with such nonsense, I recognize that it is fully achieved.

But if there should be some surreal message behind such incongruity, I confess that it has escaped me, almost completely.

Never mind!

Holy Spider is an intelligent criticism of the Iranian theocratic regime which, although it maintains an apparent legality, instills religious fanaticism in its population, to the point of provoking violence, especially against women.

It is a film that could never have been made in Iran, due to its clearly critical political message of theocratic power and the boldness of its scenes.

However, it is directed by an Iranian, who lives in Sweden, and with Iranian actors or Iranian descendants, exiled in Europe.

It was filmed in Jordan, which passes for Iran and the holy city of Mashhad, where the events that inspire the film took place.

While Iran does not change, Iranians change, especially abroad, but also, more slowly, in the mentality that supports their fundamentalist regime.

The Indian Cinema Paradise is called Galaxy, it is located in a small town in Gujarat and its hero is a young Brahmin sorcerer's apprentice named Samay, which literally means time. The time that passes and makes projectors and old films obsolete, the time needed to grow up and learn English and above all to leave his small village of Chalala and embark on the great adventure of discovering light and the stories it has to tell.

A beautiful parable from a director who is also a self-taught artist, passionate about cinema, and who gained prominence on the world stage with the success of his debut film, Samsara, in 2001.