A observation I made halfway through L'amour en fuite for a note left unfinished: "Les 400 Coups is like the primal scene: it begins Truffaut's career but he can't face it again, and his whole career is like an attempt to escape it." Of course, by the end of that film he does engage with it but the treatment isn't really convincing - it's inconceivable that the Doinel of '59 is the same person as the Doinel of '79. That…
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The Man Who Loved Women 1977
More revealing as a text on cinema than La nuit américaine because the real question for Truffaut was never how to make a film but rather the relationship of filmmaking to writing. Of course it's true that in almost every review of his from the 1950s, Truffaut would oppose the way of making one film to another but these demarcations never rise to the level of an ethic in the way that they would in the work of his peers,…
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Hidden 2020
Panahi's films are increasingly only addressed to a very specific metropolitan audience, made now with a certain self-important authority never found in the work of his mentor (who he is nonetheless so eager to emulate). It is hard to regard this turn as anything other than unfortunate, given it is this very audience which is treated with great ambivalence in what remains his single great work, Offside. Since then, his work has taken on the significance of the self-conscious activist…
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Blow Out 1981
It's hard enough to express a single idea in a film, so when an artist is able to express all of the concerns of his heart - eroticism, political corruption, the law, obsessions of all stripes, war, Hitchcock - in a single statement, it demands our admiration. This is the easiest of all of De Palma's films to love. It's probably, after Carlito's Way, his best. Travolta is like Bogart's character in Casablanca, formerly a man of principles who chooses…
