Douglas Messerli
Messerli is the author of several books of poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a multi-volume cultural memoir. He edits Green Integer and was the former publisher of Sun & Moon Press.
The angel meets his devil
[ filmreviews ]
“if Rath is not exactly an angel, he is, at least, a kind of tormented saint”
Two harbours
[ filmreviews ]
If neither Carné’s tragic vision in Le quai des brumes nor Kaurismäki’s more positive presentation of life in Le Havre is very realistic, who cares?
Excelsior
[ filmreviews ]
Or: bah, humbug...
Alternative Bonds
[ filmreviews ]
A more ambiguous (and ageing) 007
Euclid’s first axiom
[ filmreviews ]
Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is so much more ambitious than any other American movie of the year that one would have to a cynic to deny its worth
The do-gooders
[ filmreviews ]
Cristian Mungiu’s film, Beyond the Hills is a straightforward and honest film about the friendship between two young women
Made to disappear
[ filmreviews ]
Jean Grémillon's Stormy Weather is a glorious requiem to a lost world
Joining the dead
[ filmreviews ]
Michael Haneke’s Amour is simple, but devastating
Making it up
[ filmreviews ]
Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master may not be great cinema, but it's worth watching and rewatching
Angel of death
[ filmreviews ]
Richard Linklater's film about Bernie, a murderer and upstanding guy, reveals much about small-town America
Witnesses
[ filmreviews ]
"To reassure people, you only have to deny the facts." Le diable probablement seems strangely prophetic
Feeling dizzy
[ filmreviews ]
The characters of Diary of a Shinjuku Thief have given up any sense of their ability to influence or dominate events
Burning up
[ filmreviews ]
Don Levy's Herostratus is one of the most influential films you've never heard of
The case of the missing father
[ filmreviews ]
The makers of The Kid with a Bike have transformed a simple story into a kind of situational fairytale
Pleasure, passion, lust
[ filmreviews ]
Despite its nods to Brief Encounter, Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea is utterly different
Alternative lives
[ filmreviews ]
Belgian director Van Dormael explores, sometimes comically and other times more tragically, a boy's question: "Why am I me and not somebody else?"
Quicksand
[ filmreviews ]
“The Artist is a sort of wonderful fraud, a film that just like forged art works, looks like an original until you discover that the paint did not exist during the artist's"
Into the past
[ filmreviews ]
Woody Allen portrayal of Paris bring a glow to the City of light - and a bit of less welcome golden age thinking
Four Olivers
[ filmreviews ]
"It matters that Fagin, faced with the British justice system, goes mad."
Ruling us
[ filmreviews ]
DiCaprio delivers the best role of his career as J Edgar Hoover, but a creaky plot structure doesn't help
Sentimental life
[ filmreviews ]
People who like that sort of thing will like this...
Ready for love
[ filmreviews ]
A good film about the little things in life.
Learning to pretend
[ filmreviews ]
Léonetti’s debut is a stylish but empty portrayal of a dystopian future
Three films by Luchino Visconti
[ filmreviews ]
Another look at the recently reissued Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Il gattopardo and Senso
Ash to ash
[ filmreviews ]
A simple and spectacularly beautiful film about Calabrian life whose only professional participant was a dog.
Adopting a family
[ filmreviews ]
Confusing sexual issues in The Kids Are All Right and even more puzzling social relationships in Another Year
The secret in their eyes
[ filmreviews ]
An appealing mixture of detective story, love story, political mystery and film noir
Shedding skin
[ filmreviews ]
Two films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul revisited
Beginnings and endings
[ filmreviews ]
The Ghost Writer is visually stunning, excitingly scripted, and heighted by a well-crafted score with near perfect sound.
Trying not to love
[ filmreviews ]
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is deceptively simple
A matter of conscience
[ filmreviews ]
A lot happens in the cracks of Porumboiu's Police, adjective
Traveler without a backpack
[ filmreviews ]
The creepy stuff I did
[ opinion - november 09 ]
"While recently listening to David Letterman's 'confession' of his sexual encounters on late-night television, I was more than a little frightened by my fellow citizens' sexual prudery."
Lorna's silence
[ filmreviews ]
Miracles happen, even in the bleakest of films.
Suna No Onna & Rikyu
[ filmreviews ]
Two films by Hiroshi Teshigahara.
Two Pabst operas
[ filmreviews ]
Looking back at Pandora's Box and The Threepenny Opera.
Starting over
[ filmreviews ]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata is lugubrious but engaging.
Cemetery of garbage
[ filmreviews ]
An impressive, if rambling, look at the Neapolitan crime group Camorra in Gomorrah.
The curious case of Benjamin Button
[ filmreviews ]
A strange (and strangely redemptive) film...
Woman on the periphery
[ filmreviews ]
Max Ophuls's The earrings of Madame de... emerges from unjustified neglect.
In the middle of nowhere: three films by Budd Boetticher
[ filmreviews ]
Four films of Kon Ichikawa
[ filmreviews ]
An appreciation of the great Japanese director who died earlier this year.
A hole in the world
[ filmreviews ]
Burton's Sweeney Todd remains loyal to Sondheim's dark paean to love and revenge.
Revolutions
[ cdreviews | filmreviews ]
Almodóvar's Volver is a kind of 'revolution' is several senses.
The Duchess of Langeais
[ filmreviews ]
Don't touch that axe...
4 Months 3 Weeks & 2 Days
[ filmreviews ]
"A testament to the millions of individuals who suffered and survived the bleak Communist regimes"
The woman most likely to raise dogs
[ bookreviews ]
Nancy Cunard was a woman to fall in love with
Looking back at The Adventure
[ filmreviews ]
"Our perceptions of films and cinematic images have so radically changed that it is difficult to understand the reactions of filmgoers and commentators in 1960, the year when I had just become a teenager."
The lives of others
[ filmreviews ]
Possibility in a world where nothing is left to chance.
Blood of an innocent
[ filmreviews ]
Del Toro negotiates a path between paternalistic and magic realities.
The unordinary obsessions of ordinary lives
[ filmreviews ]
In 'Year of the Dog', Mike White's latest film, his characters manage to embrace their everyday reality.
Flags and letters
[ filmreviews ]
"It appears, [Clint] Eastwood suggests, that a culture that prefers flags to letters, a culture which offers up symbols as opposed to simple human expression, is doomed to estrangement."
Just people
[ bookreviews ]
Two new books on the American civil rights movement restate Gunnar Myrdal's prophetic argument that the issue of race is not an African-American problem but a white one.
The Queen bows
[ filmreviews ]
Leaving the twentieth century...
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