Duelle (1976)

Browsing through the library feature of Mubi, I stumbled across Duelle (1976; Duelle (une quarantaine), directed by Jacques Rivette, and I was drawn in by the plot summary describing a battle between the Daughter Of The Moon (Juliet Berto) and the Daughter Of The Sun (Bulle Ogier). A fantasy battle is embedded in noir styled […]

Mirror (1975)

Ten minutes into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975; Zerkalo or The Mirror), there’s a scene where a doctor (Anatoly Solonitsyn from Stalker) walks away from a conversation with a woman, Maria (Margarita Terekhova) he has met travelling through the countryside. As we see the back of him in the middle distance of a field, a wind […]

Go Go Tales (2007)

Abel Ferrara makes a comedy, Go Go Tales (2007), which is set in a go-go joint strip club, a project he’d always wanted to make, describing it as “Cheers meets The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie.” Much like Cassavettes’ film, Go Go Tales sees the strip club as a metaphor for filmmaking, for creative expression […]

Le Bonheur (1965)

I didn’t know much about Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965; title translates as “Happiness”) before I started watching it except for the title credit image of the hetreosexual nuclear family blurred in the distance while a sunflower is in the foreground and noted comparisons to The Stepford Wives. It’s all about Francois (Jean-Claude Drouot) who […]

Kings Of The Road (1976)

I’d long wanted to see Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976; Im Lauf der Zeit, “in the course of time” is the translated title). All I knew about it was that it was three hours long, filmed in black and white, and shot in Germany (West Germany at the time), and involved cinemas. It […]