In this smart, tangy neo-gothic ghost story, the Thai director Wisit Sasanatieng (“Tears of the Black Tiger”) cleverly recycles every cliché in the book and adds a sense of wonder all his own. Nualjan, a poor, pregnant country girl, wanders far from home in search of her missing husband, and, exhausted, stops at a lonely rural manor. There, Somjit, a tyrannical housemaid, grudgingly takes her in with a warning to stay far from the mistress of the house, Madame Ranjuan. But a glimpse of Ranjuan through a high window reveals her odd resemblance to Nualjan herself. And when the guest gives birth, Ranjuan takes an unusually strong interest in the newborn. To the film’s eerie apparitions and disappearances, an evil old crone, a vampire legend, ... Continue reading →

I’ve never concealed my admiration—indeed, my love—for Wes Anderson’s films, and in my Profile of Anderson, which appeared in the magazine, in 2009, I looked at the experiences, the ideas, the precedents, and the practices that converge in his cinematic accomplishments. The style of his films is instantly recognizable—he’s one of the few filmmakers of whom this is so—and it’s this very consistency that some hold against him. In the Profile, I talked a little about the substance that the style embodies and conveys (I’ll get back to that here). Well, stylistically, his new film, “Moonrise Kingdom,” which opens tomorrow, is more of the same. Emotionally, it’s astonishingly romantic (though I’d argue that this is true of all of his films); it runs on the ... Continue reading →

Outre un triste déficit de grands films (dont Cannes, après une année exceptionnelle, est peut-être moins le responsable que le symptôme, la monumentale chambre d’écho pailletée), l’édition 2012 enregistre la décrue nette d’un certain mondialisme de la fiction. Cette année, le Festival accueille peu de films qui, en écho à une tendance pourtant hyperactuelle, apparaîtraient portés par un désir d’enjamber les continents ou d’embrasser l’époque et le monde dans leur réalité planétarisée. Pour un Kiarostami parti en goguette au Japon, on ne compte en revanche plus les films marquants, réussis ou non, qui, à rebours de cette tendance, semblent s’organiser dans la forme du repli, récits en chambre (médicalisée chez Haneke, hôtelière pour Weerasethakul), en couvent (Mungiu), en tente Quechua (Hong Sang-soo), entre deux portes ... Continue reading →