Black Girl
“Some boomerang, this story,” an inspector observes, in the novella Black Girl by Ousmane Sembéne, which he adapted for film. I won’t reveal the scene of the crime, but the…
Read More
The Trouble with Angels
I wasn’t sure about writing this review until reading a back issue of Film Comment wherein Joan Rivers listed it as one of her guilty pleasures. Please don’t ask for…
Read More
The Green Pastures
Whiteness in America, Michael Eric Dyson writes, is the result of “breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was…
Read More
Downhill Racer
In junior high, I was given the most fantastic textbook. That might seem an oxymoron to you and maybe I had low standards at the time, but it was an…
Read More
Paris Blues
Paris Blues has many shades, but only one is visible to us: a whole crew wrote and rewrote the script, and in receiving the reports on these various drafts, there…
Read More
The Miracle Woman
As an average American high school student, in addition to being tested on what I could remember, I was tested on what I would become. There were personality tests, aptitude…
Read More
I Knew Her Well
I Knew Her Well opens with a landscape shot of a beach, steadily panning across the sand and continuing onto the body of Adriana Astarelli (Stefania Sandrelli). We are primed…
Read More
The Landlord
“If you didn’t sweat so much nobody’d take you for a landlord,” Fanny (Diana Sands) tells Elgar (Beau Bridges). “You could pass for a human being.” Actually, The Landlord does…
Read More
Brief Encounter
The first film review I ever wrote was of Brief Encounter, for a Wisconsin Lutheran college newspaper. The review is, mercifully, lost to us, and so I find myself writing…
Read More
Remember the Night
Anyone who tries to write comedies for the screen will inevitably spend some amount of time hating Preston Sturges. The man was actually a hen who squeezed out golden eggs…
Read More