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Vengeance 2009
Johnnie To's multilingual near-masterpiece follows a gnomish, trenchcoated hitman-turned-restaurateur (craggy Johnny Hallyday) who hires a trio of Cantonese assassins (including Anthony Wong and To's very own Victor McLaglen, Suet Lam) to find the men who killed his daughter's family. For all of the love that To and his indefatigable screenwriter Wai Ka-Fai have for the mechanics of genre, their characters are individuals instead of merely types, and as such they occupy the frame instead of merely moving through it; these…
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Ali 2001
The greatest films made on biographical subjects--whether it's Mizoguchi's UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN, Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE, Becker's MONTPARNASSE 19, Rudolph's MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRLCE, Tarkovsky's ANDREI RUBLEV, Pialat's VAN GOGH or Mann's ALI--were made by people who weren't interested in biography, but in life. ALI is what Orson Welles meant when he called for a hallucinatory cinema. There's the opening sequence, which folds a decade in on itself; the boxing rings that might as well be…
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L'Argent 1983
In 1983, Robert Bresson was about as old as the 20th century. That's the best kind of lifespan: to live out the entirety of a century from start to finish (Bresson, in fact, nearly outlived it). So L'ARGENT is the film of an 82-year-old man, and by 82, you come to realize that the great moral question isn't why people commit crimes, but why they don't. And another important question comes around, especially if you live in a wealthy country:…
