World cinema
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I wasn’t very pleased when Roberto Benigni won Best Actor at the Academy Awards, danced on chairs and expressed a fervent desire to make love to everyone in the auditorium. I felt Tom Hanks deserved the statuette that year, for his portrayal of Capt. John Miller in Saving Private Ryan. Having said that, I did
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There is so much about this movie that is memorable. Still, if I pick the scenes that have stayed with me, they would be as follows: 1. A young journalist takes the old man on a tour of the Tokyo nightlife. They end up in a bar where a lot of people are talking, some
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If I had to pick just one director who has enriched my life the most through his work, it would have to be Akira Kurosawa. I have not watched many of his movies. Just three, in fact. But two of them have left a profound impression. The first was Rashomon, which I saw years ago
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Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni are no more. I know little of their work, so I cannot speak knowledgeably of them. They haven’t done much in recent years, so there’s no point talking about the great loss to cinema. But maybe it’s a good occasion to remember what they did when they were alive and
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There are movies that tickle the funny bone. There are movies that gently tug at your heartstrings and tickle the funny bone at the same time. And then there are movies so delightful that you can’t stop smiling for a long time after you see them. And then, there’s Amelie. Here is a movie constructed
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Today seems to have been Monstrous Dictator Day for me. I watched a couple of movies – Den Untergang (aka Downfall) and The Last King of Scotland. The former tells the story of the last days of Adolf Hitler, seen through the eyes of his secretary. The latter tells the story of the reign of
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Roger Ebert’s essay on Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru – it’s so well written, so passionate in its description of the movie, that it ranks among my favourite pieces of writing in general. A lot of what Ebert has written about the movies is brilliant, but his essay on Ikiru is, I think, his best work to
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