James Morrison

In a remarkable new film called Far from Heaven, Julianne Moore plays Cathy, an upper-class housewife in a posh Connecticut suburb in the 1950s. Early in the film, when she discovers her husband in the arms of another man, she is shocked–but not to the extent we might have expected. The hidebound world she inhabits […]

The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz was the first film starring Bob Crane. It was released in 1968. By that time, by virtue of the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, Crane was already, for what it was worth, a “star.” The now dimly remembered Elke Sommer was his co-star in the film. After its release, she […]

“Sometimes,” says Bruce Weber, narrating his lovely film Chop Suey, the highlight of the 7th Annual North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, “you photograph what you can never be.” The festival provides ample evidence for Weber’s claim but also, in its variety and range, for its opposite. Sometimes you try to be what you […]

“We can only make sense of life backwards,” says a character near the end of 13 Conversations About One Thing. “Too bad we got to live it forwards.” It’s doubtful that this character has been reading Kierkegaard, the author of the aphorism this line paraphrases. But in Jill Sprecher’s smart, warm and thoughtful new film, […]

People used to say, and maybe some still do, that video and DVD would revolutionize the movies. By rights, they should have. Anyone could have predicted that they would improve the economies of filmmaking, change audiences’ ideas about quality and value in film, cause the industry to pay less attention to immediate profits and more […]

Bozena (Veronika Zilkova) and Karel (Jan Hartel) are a young couple living in a city in Czechoslovakia, who have just been told by doctors that they can’t have children. The next week, in the country, Karel on a whim carves a tree stump into a puppet, and presents it to his wife as a substitute […]

Steven Spielberg, a recent graduate of Cal State Long Beach, has released his first film since obtaining his bachelor’s degree in May, and it shows interesting differences from many of the films of his undergraduate decades. To date, Spielberg’s most characteristic films have concerned nostalgia for a simpler time of mythic lore, typically embodied in […]

How to make a movie that’s both kinky and austere: That is the artistic problem The Piano Teacher solves. It’s unlikely that the solutions will be widely adopted, however. The movie is placidly esoteric and singular, its versions of sexuality as straightforward and raw as those of Last Tango in Paris or L’Humanité. The topic, […]

This summer, the Carolina Theatre in Durham exhibits an exclusive series of films from around the world, every one of them worth seeing. These are movies that Triangle filmgoers would not otherwise have a chance to see, including the controversial The Piano Teacher (to be reviewed next week), Jan Svankmajer’s extraordinary Little Otick, and an […]