In certain serious movies of late, the motivating presence at the story’s center is actually an absence: a dead child. Both Todd Field’s critically acclaimed In the Bedroom and Nanni Moretti’s forthcoming The Son’s Room, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, concern families dealing with the sudden loss of sons. The new […]
Godfrey Cheshire
Posted inFilm & Television
Home and Away
Todd Field’s In the Bedroom is a rare independent film that is bound to strike many intelligent filmgoers as the best movie of the year for the simple reason that it gives us so many satisfactions that kiddie-centric Hollywood long since abandoned: realistic situations, deep, complex and sometimes very painful emotions, and an execution that […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Space Ghost
In movies as elsewhere, 2001 was a scarred, haunted year in ways that few people could have begun to imagine. For the first time in 23 years as a film reviewer, I was, in the two months following Sept. 11, driven away from my main subject to write about the world beyond the movie theater, […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Movies by Design
Early in the fall, Hollywood tipsters began predicting that Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind would be the movie to beat for next spring’s Best Picture Oscar. Studio-generated or not, that opinion is perfectly comprehensible now that I’ve seen the movie, a drama featuring Russell Crowe as the mentally troubled, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Star Glazing
In 1989, when his sex, lies and videotape won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival–an unheard-of feat for a low-budget indie film by a young American director–Steven Soderbergh described the experience as like being “a Beatle for a day.” Since then, while enjoying a career that has emerged as one of the most […]
Posted inArt
Perennial Wisdom
The philosophy espoused by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, one scholar commenting on it in this new volume says, “is out of fashion with philosophers in the late modern European traditions, including postmodernism.” Then, as if with an awkward cough, the commentator immediately corrects himself: “‘Out of fashion’ is a misstatement: they dismiss it with ridicule.” Of […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Dream Sequence
On first taking the plunge into Islamic esoteric thought a few years back, the concept I found most startling and initially most difficult to grasp was that of the “imaginal realm.” The term was proposed by the great French scholar of Iranian Shiite, Sufi and pre-Islamic thought Henry Corbin, who was translating an Arabic phrase […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Zen Coen
Easily one of the two or three best American films of 2001, Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There builds its chilly, poetic allure on a striking combination of precision and reticence. The precision belongs to the movie’s language and look, which mine the conventions of classic noir and pulp fiction to give […]
Posted inArt
Truisms and Consequences
As surely as it produces casualties, any war generates truisms, which tend to arrive in a dizzying cascade. In the early moments of the present conflict, a truism that catapulted straight from the White House press room onto the nation’s op-ed pages held that the violence being enacted on the world stage was “not about […]
Posted inArt
Beasts of Burden
The two tales each contain a beast of burden: a donkey, let us say. One story takes place at the western end of the Islamic world late in the 12th century; the other, a few decades later, toward the eastern edge of that world. In certain ways, they are stories of “long ago and far […]
