Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens with the one last wish of a very old birthday boy Henrik Vanger, a retired industrialist. Every year he receives a new exotic flower as a birthday gift and it is a constant reminder of the decades old unsolved disappearance of his brother’s daughter that continues [...]
Posts under ‘Foreign’
PIFF Movie Review: Emotional Arithmetic
Paolo Barzman’s Emotional Arithmetic is an inequation with four very capable actors on one side and a whole that doesn’t add up on the other. Nobody can be blamed of over-expecting when Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne, Max von Sydow and Susan Sarandon star not in a grand epic but a gentle drama. They play such [...]
PIFF Movie Interpretation: Three Monkeys
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film making style is mostly categorized as ‘high art’ making him a Cannes favorite and an acquired taste. His Three Monkeys (Üç Maymun) was one of the PIFF 2009 movies that I didn’t like then but think about even now. I have now finalized one interpretation. It is amazing how much [...]
PIFF Movie Review: Drifting Clouds
Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet karkaavat) is the movie that introduced me to Aki Kaurismäki’s world, a world unlike any other. Before the movie, PIFF 2009 screened his ten-minute long short movie Dogs Have No Hell as a primer. I learnt that the acting would be minimal, humor deadpan, reel old, and the setting Helsinki. I [...]
PIFF Movie Review: Meurtrières
After Die Fälscher and Fame Chimica that morning, Patrick Grandperret’s Meurtrières was the third movie that used the same screenplay technique. The opening is followed by a movie-long flashback which leads to the opening. I thought it worked best in Meurtrières. Die Fälscher would have been no worse without that opening, Fame Chimica would have [...]