Luchino Visconti
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Sundance Critic’s Notebook 2021 1 (Vadim Rizov): The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, Flee
“We’re sad to miss you on the Park City mountain this year and look forward to the day we can once again gather under one roof,” read HBO Docs’s email leading up to this year’s Sundance. “Until then, we encourage spending lots of time in front of your screen watching documentaries.” This is admirably direct and succinct, if bleak, and thus a fitting welcome to Sundance 2021; those who’ve physically attended in recent years can stroll down Virtual Main Street and experience brand overexposure all over again. You can “Bring [Chase] Sapphire on Main Home” or pop into the area […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2021 -
Love is Colder Than Death: Luca Guadagnino on Suspiria
I’m not sure whether or not Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a masterpiece, but I’m certain that it warrants being compared to quite a few films that are. The one that immediately sprang to mind when the lights came up was The Godfather. With The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola took the gangster movie and attempted to expand its emotional range and social and political themes without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of genre filmmaking. Guadagino’s Suspiria attempts to do something similar with the horror film, with a startling degree of success. Here is a curious fact of film history. Though horror movies […]
by Larry Gross on Sep 17, 2018 -
Rocco and His Brothers, Dietrich and Von Sternberg, and Dragon Inn: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
One of the most important restorations of the last few years makes its way to Blu-ray this week with Milestone’s exquisite release of Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960). A brutally realistic, emotionally charged family saga that flies by in three of the most involving hours ever put on film, Rocco and His Brothers is an extraordinary combination of Visconti’s neorealist side (previously seen in Ossessione and La Terra Trema) and the operatic, ambitious tendency toward tumultuous historical change and penetrating social commentary that characterizes later masterpieces like The Leopard and The Damned. The film follows the brothers of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 13, 2018
