Matthew Cole Levine
  • Fiction
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Archive
  • About

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

2/24/2020

2 Comments

 
Picture
As a historical romance between two women set on an island in Brittany, Portrait of a Lady on Fire sounds like standard prestige-picture fare: a stately tale of burning desire and repression, with unsubtle parallels to our own time. But even if Céline Sciamma's film teems with lustful glances and pointed critiques of marriage and patriarchy, it's infinitely more interesting, sensuous, and arresting than that description makes it sound. With its overt feminism and depiction of the burgeoning identity of a young female artist, the film inevitably conjures recent fare like The Souvenir and Greta Gerwig's Little Women, but Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the most compelling and quietly radical among them: an enigmatic film about the battle waged between realism and expressionism. 

Read More
2 Comments

Roman Holiday

12/16/2018

0 Comments

 
Picture
Even those who bristle at romantic comedies may find themselves wooed by Roman Holiday: shot entirely in Rome, featuring Audrey Hepburn in her debut performance, and directed by one of the finest storytellers in the Golden Age of Hollywood, there’s simply no resisting the most romantic movie ever made. The effervescent joys of Roman Holiday are even more surprising considering the quiet, lingering tone of the film—with lengthy stretches devoted not to plot progression, but to character development—and the lack of a happy ending (or, at least, the happy ending we might have expected). There’s no question the movie is about love, but it’s also about the raw deal that fate or happenstance seems to offer us much of the time: “Life isn’t always what one likes,” says one character, but Roman Holiday is still hopeful that it can occasionally provide us with euphoric splendors.    

Read More
0 Comments

    Archives

    October 2022
    June 2022
    April 2022
    September 2021
    February 2020
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018

    Categories

    All
    Action
    African Film
    American Cinema
    Anime
    British Film
    Classics
    Climate Change
    Comedy
    Crime
    Cult
    Dance
    Documentary
    Drama
    Ethnography
    European Film
    Fantasy
    Filipino Cinema
    French Cinema
    Historical
    Horror
    Iranian Cinema
    Japanese Cinema
    Middle Eastern Cinema
    Monster Movies
    New Releases
    Pre-Code Cinema
    Romance
    Russian Cinema
    Samurai Movies
    Science Fiction
    Silent Movies
    Superheroes
    Surrealism
    Thriller/Suspense
    Top 100
    Turkish Cinema
    War
    Western

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Fiction
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Archive
  • About