The legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt remains one of the great jazzmen to emerge from Europe in the 20th century, recording hundreds of memorable tracks during his lifetime, playing with the likes of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins, and influencing countless artists in the decades that followed his untimely death from a stroke at the age of 43. His music has also graced the soundtracks of dozens of movies, including a swath of Woody Allen films (Sweet and Lowdown is a playful hommage to him) and anything ranging from Lacombe Lucien to The Matrix.
But there’s much less known...
But there’s much less known...
- 2/9/2017
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Our critic has been awarded an OBE for services to film. Here he reflects on a life of cinema and chooses extracts from five of his movie reviews
Casting my mind back to my Observer debut, it occurred to me that, had I been celebrating half a century of writing on films for the paper in 1963, I would have been reflecting on a career begun by reviewing the arrival of Charlie Chaplin and going on to Dw Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But the Observer didn't have a movie critic until the mid-1920s, when the Honourable Ivor Montagu (a peer's son, table tennis champion, lifelong communist, the man who saved Hitchcock's bacon by re-editing The Lodger) joined the paper. He was succeeded in 1928 by the Manchester Guardian's critic, CA Lejeune, who helped create the view widely held in Fleet Street that reviewing films was women's work. Indeed, her first...
Casting my mind back to my Observer debut, it occurred to me that, had I been celebrating half a century of writing on films for the paper in 1963, I would have been reflecting on a career begun by reviewing the arrival of Charlie Chaplin and going on to Dw Griffith's Birth of a Nation. But the Observer didn't have a movie critic until the mid-1920s, when the Honourable Ivor Montagu (a peer's son, table tennis champion, lifelong communist, the man who saved Hitchcock's bacon by re-editing The Lodger) joined the paper. He was succeeded in 1928 by the Manchester Guardian's critic, CA Lejeune, who helped create the view widely held in Fleet Street that reviewing films was women's work. Indeed, her first...
- 12/30/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Hadewijch was an obscure 13th-century poet and mystic from the Dutch province of Brabant, whose name is taken by the 20-year-old French novice Céline (the non-professional actress Julie Sokolowski) in this characteristically inert film by the French moviemaker Bruno Dumont, a Robert Bresson follower of a religious bent. Céline is kicked out of her convent for excessive zealotry, which involves going without food and drink, and returns to study theology in Paris where her haut-bourgeois family (her father is in the government) lives in some style on the Ile St-Louis.
Having been rejected by the church she falls in with some young Arabs, who introduce her to a charismatic Muslim religious teacher and political activist. He takes her to witness the persecution of his people in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where she is apparently persuaded to participate in a terrorist action.
It's rather like a version of Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien,...
Having been rejected by the church she falls in with some young Arabs, who introduce her to a charismatic Muslim religious teacher and political activist. He takes her to witness the persecution of his people in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where she is apparently persuaded to participate in a terrorist action.
It's rather like a version of Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien,...
- 2/19/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Mon Oncle Antoine
Directed by Claude Jutra
Canada, 1971
Mon Oncle Antoine could easily have been directed by Louis Malle. Its bittersweet tone, its curious, naïve protagonist, its meandering semi-narrative structure all find cousins in such films as Murmur of the Heart (released the same year, 1971), Lacombe Lucien, and Au Revoir Les Enfants.
For that matter, Mon Oncle Antoine could easily have been directed by Bill Forsyth. Its rejection of traditional narrative principles, its look at a small, tightly-knit community, its balancing act of comedy and coming-of-age all find cousins in such films as That Sinking Feeling, Gregory’s Girl, and Gregory’s Two Girls.
While Malle, Forsyth, and Claude Jutra might form some distinct directorial triumvirate, Mon Oncle Antoine is still uniquely Jutra.
The plotting is simple. Adolescent Benoit (a magnificent Jacques Gagnon) lives in foster care with his uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and aunt Cecile (Olivette Thibault). Also in...
Directed by Claude Jutra
Canada, 1971
Mon Oncle Antoine could easily have been directed by Louis Malle. Its bittersweet tone, its curious, naïve protagonist, its meandering semi-narrative structure all find cousins in such films as Murmur of the Heart (released the same year, 1971), Lacombe Lucien, and Au Revoir Les Enfants.
For that matter, Mon Oncle Antoine could easily have been directed by Bill Forsyth. Its rejection of traditional narrative principles, its look at a small, tightly-knit community, its balancing act of comedy and coming-of-age all find cousins in such films as That Sinking Feeling, Gregory’s Girl, and Gregory’s Two Girls.
While Malle, Forsyth, and Claude Jutra might form some distinct directorial triumvirate, Mon Oncle Antoine is still uniquely Jutra.
The plotting is simple. Adolescent Benoit (a magnificent Jacques Gagnon) lives in foster care with his uncle Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and aunt Cecile (Olivette Thibault). Also in...
- 7/14/2011
- by Neal Dhand
- SoundOnSight
This list of all-time greats will no doubt have some readers flinging their cappuccinos in disgust. Which choices put the sin in cineaste?
There will be blood. Today's list, more than any other in our series of seven guides to the 25 best films in each genre, is guaranteed to ruffle feathers and provoke punch-ups, even of the online kind. As my colleague Michael Hann wrote yesterday in the action blogpost thread, we didn't intend it to be so: we'd have liked 21 supplements so every genre could be given the space and respect they all undoubtedly deserve. But sadly we could only stretch to seven, hence a few mash-ups, like the one today (kudos to Jason Solomons for an admirable wrangle of a definition from our picks).
So: how much of a triumph or a travesty is the final list? Myself, I'm unconvinced The Graduate should be that high (more of...
There will be blood. Today's list, more than any other in our series of seven guides to the 25 best films in each genre, is guaranteed to ruffle feathers and provoke punch-ups, even of the online kind. As my colleague Michael Hann wrote yesterday in the action blogpost thread, we didn't intend it to be so: we'd have liked 21 supplements so every genre could be given the space and respect they all undoubtedly deserve. But sadly we could only stretch to seven, hence a few mash-ups, like the one today (kudos to Jason Solomons for an admirable wrangle of a definition from our picks).
So: how much of a triumph or a travesty is the final list? Myself, I'm unconvinced The Graduate should be that high (more of...
- 10/20/2010
- by Catherine Shoard
- The Guardian - Film News
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