Annette Bening stars as the sadly forgotten Hollywood bad girl, Gloria Grahame, an actress whose assertive sensuality lit up the screen in such memorable films as It's a Wonderful Life, The Big Heat, and The Bad and the Beautiful, for which she took home a deserved supporting-actress Oscar. Nobody looks …
Wim Wenders's trickle-paced thriller is no doubt intended as a paean to Dashiell Hammett, though its orientation is much more toward the movies adapted from, or in the genre of, his work, than toward the work itself. The Forties-ish studio sets, the Venetian blinds, the shadows, and the gallery of …
The Intermezzo musical triangle relocated in country-western country, and making a prized sex object out of Willie Nelson, that easy alliance between the redneck and the hippie, whose physical attributes might have been thought to make him a closer cousin to Gabby Hayes than to Leslie Howard. The flimsy narrative …
The third in a sort of trilogy of road movies by Wim Wenders goes a good deal further than its forerunners (Alice in the Cities, Wrong Moves), and not just in actual length. (On that point, however, it should be said that Wenders makes a positive value of length, stretching …
A falsely modest title, or falsely lightweight, for a pious parable about a contrite murderer in quest of atonement: cozying up to his victim's sister after twenty-three years in confinement, carrying her groceries, presenting her a rose, keeping his identity to himself. Billy Bob Thornton plays the slow-witted, humor-impaired protagonist …
Argentine dance sensations Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves spent almost 50 years thrilling audiences with their ballroom pyrotechnics. Their offstage romance was anything but enjoyable. Copes began his emotional withdrawal almost immediately after the “I do’s” were exchanged. Given his predilection for chorines, compounded by a stoical sense of …
This is a doughy lump of a soap opera pounded out to the specifications of a road movie; its director is an inveterate vagabond asked to do the job of a Mr. Fix-it. The outcome is often beautiful, more often artificial. One does not look to Wim Wenders for much …
Hirayama is content with his simple life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Unexpected encounters reveal more of his story in a deeply moving and poetic reflection on finding beauty in the world around us. …
An elegant, heartfelt, never-sappy salute to the late German choreographer Philippina “Pina” Bausch and her dancers. Veteran fan and auteur Wim Wenders uses 3-D superbly to put us inside intensely kinetic, body-stressing dances (most in short form). They can be a little retro-vanguard but are always vivid, witty, and/or beautiful. …
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Yes, I have received and do value the word of Pope Francis, in particular his holiness's unwillingness to duck tough issues like gay rights, the Holocaust, and what he perceives to be, “today’s globalization of indifference.” (Though he asks that people make eye-contact …
One of the myriad imitation-Hitchcocks from France, and one of the handful from director René Clément alone: an adaptation of the first of Patricia Highsmith's five Ripley novels. (Wim Wenders's The American Friend is an adaptation of the third.) Like Hitchcock's own Highsmith adaptation, Strangers on a Train, this one …
Peter Bogdanovich trespasses on Graham Greene territory, a story of life in exile, a wallow in waywardness, and an undoubted treat for the alienated and the sullied. The narrative exposition in general, and the badly recorded Orson Welles-ian dialogue in particular, is like slush, but the movie achieves a certain …
Documentary about the life and work of the Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado, co-directed by his son Juliano and his longtime admirer Wim Wenders (Pina). Or rather, about the relationship of Salgado's life and work: the way his life led to his work, and the way his work nearly wrecked his …
Or more specifically, the state of the art. Wim Wenders's exercise in self-analysis is, firstly, a rumination on the importance of story. On the one hand: "Stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by without the need to turn into stories." But: "Life without stories -- it isn't worth …
The truest movie translation, to date, of a Patricia Highsmith thriller -- a category that includes the likes of Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, René Clement's Purple Noon, and Wim Wenders's The American Friend. Despite the offbeat casting of Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou (neither of whom has ever been …