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 […]

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 […]

After Hours (1985)

During the mid-1980s, director Martin Scorsese’s career was stuck after the lack of box office success for The King Of Comedy and his frustration trying to get The Last Temptation Of Christ financed by a major studio. Connecting with an independent production by actor Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson (who acted in Mean Streets), they […]

Salesman (1969)

Ten minutes into the documentary Salesman (1969), I had to say out loud, “What a miserable business.” Filmed in the cinema verite style, just following real people without any talking heads interviews or narration, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin pioneered the narrative non-fiction film with Salesman, their attempt to do for cinema […]