What Made Her Do It?
"Life is a path of suffering that leads to death..." So begins What Made Her Do It? (1930, Japanese: 何が彼女をそうさせたか). (Silent film based on...
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- 2 min
I Was Born, But...
Yasujirō Ozu's 1932 silent comedy I Was Born, But... is still entertaining today. (Japanese: 大人の見る絵本生れてはみたけれど) One of Ozu's earliest...
- 2 min
Exotics and Retrospectives
Exotics and Retrospectives (1898) is among Lafcadio Hearn's earlier works on Japan. It starts off with the author's account of his...
- 1 min
Days of Youth
Days of Youth (Japanese: 学生ロマンス 若き日) is a 1929 silent comedy from Yasujirō Ozu. The seven or eight films he directed before this are...
- 1 min
Ambivalent Zen
An excellent, entertaining and, dare I say, enlightening memoir by Lawrence Shainberg that I've been meaning to read since it came out in...
- 1 min
T-Men
T-Men, a 1948 film starring Dennis O’Keefe and directed by Anthony Mann, is a noir procedural singed with greed and paranoia. In the...
- 1 min
Nothing to Envy
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009), by journalist Barbara Demick, chronicles the lives of ordinary people living in...
- 1 min
Red Roofs and Other Stories
Four disparate short stories by one of Japan's greatest writers make up this collection. Written between 1917 and 1926, they're told with...
- 1 min
Gun Crazy
Gun Crazy (a.k.a. Deadly Is the Female) is a thrill ride of a film, directed by Joseph H. Lewis and released in 1950. It stars Irish...
- 2 min
The Long Take
One of my favorites this year so far. The Long Take (2018; also known as A Way to Lose More Slowly) is a novel in narrative poetry form...
- 2 min
Naked City
A heavy case... A heavy, heavy case... So veteran detective Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) tells novice cop Det. They've been called to...
- 2 min
Key Largo
Bogie and Bacall shine in this 1948 noir set in Key Largo, but Edward G. Robinson steals the spotlight. Frank McCloud (Bogart), a...
- 3 min
The Plague
In the midst of Covid-19, it's hard to read Camus' The Plague (1947) and not regard it as representative of today. For me it also served...
- 2 min
The Hitch-Hiker
The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is the first film noir ever directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. Only about 70 minutes long, the story follows Roy and...
- 2 min
Battles Without Honor and Humanity
I've at last ventured into the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (Japanese: 仁義なき戦い; also known in English as The Yakuza Papers)....
- 1 min
The Stranger
What can I say about The Stranger that hasn't already been said? Known also as The Outsider, written by Albert Camus, published in French...
- 1 min
Italian Shoes
The first Henning Mankell novel I've read, Italian Shoes paints a vivid picture of a year in an older man's life, and is set on an...
- 1 min
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
There's not a scene in this film that isn't visually and audibly disturbing. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) left me feeling...
- 1 min
Our Man in Havana
This was quite good. I read the Graham Greene novel last year and finally got around to watching the movie yesterday. Our Man in Havana...
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