When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade

scurrilous,

That's one of the marks of a great film artist, I think-the ability to compress, condense, to find resonance in the simplest of images, and to never waste an image, making it work on a number of levels.

there is something in the quality of Ruiz's imagination that summons up those primal Hollywood pleasures, something that connects to our first film-going experiences, when we weren't old enough to follow the plots and still too young to care. Lucas and Spielberg pursue these same memories in their films, but they're too literal minded, too committe

As Andre Bazin once said, all films are created equal. Whether they play at the Biograph (as will Violette) or the Chicago (as will Halloween), we owe them the same consideration, the same right to succeed or fail on their own terms.

what matters for Ruiz is the beautiful blurrings of sense that his story creates.

Building a fire is as important as convincing an army to lift a siege-Ginepro does both, but both actions are given the same patient attention, the same narrative value.

infelicitous

she, Toddy, and Victor are suddenly united, identities dissolved in pleasure, performer and audience made one and the same.

As he films Seattle, transforming it into "Rain City," Rudolph is faced with the same decision: is he a realist or an expressionist, inventing the world or recording it? The moral and the aesthetic questions merge, as they must on the higher levels of art.

Eijanaika