John Petrakis
Flashbacks
The French film Caché (“Hidden”) is a stylish thriller tiptoeing around a psychological drama that lurks inside a political allegory. This is typical of the work of Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke (Code Unknown), who enjoys presenting confrontational films in which seemingly normal folks leading normal lives turn out to be not very normal at all.Caché, which won the Best Director Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, stars the enigmatic Daniel Auteuil and the luminescent Juliette Binoche as Georges and Anne Laurent. He hosts a television talk show about books; she is a writer who works in publishing—until an anonymous two-hour videotape interrupts their lives.
Heartbreak mountain
After the world premiere of Brokeback Mountain at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Picture, the publicity machines began referring to it as “the gay cowboy mo...
American beginnings
Terrence Malick’s The New World is not your father’s historical adventure film....
CC recommends: New on DVD
Christmas recommendations for Off the Map, Crash, Look at Me and more new DVDs—from film reviewers John Petrakis and Steve Vineberg. For recommendations in fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, theology and more, see the December 27 issue of the Century.
Celebrity reporter
Based on Gerald Clarke’s exhaustive biography, Bennett Miller’s Capote covers the six years that Truman Capote spent working on In Cold Blood....
Proof of love
Great plays tend to make mediocre movies. The elements that make a play successful don’t always provide the plot and visuals that are the keys to memorable cinema....
Family fallout
For old-school cinephiles who bemoan the demise of the classical European art film, rife with misplaced passion and rampant guilt, a familiar name has come to the rescue....
Sensual morality play
Latino cinema has a long tradition of tweaking the Catholic Church for its supposed hypocrisy, involvement in secular politics and manhandling of sexual issues....
Space opera finale
In creating Revenge of the Sith, the third (chronologically) and final (cinematically) installment in the six-film Star Wars saga, George Lucas confronted a writing challenge unpreced...
Out of Eden
Love, lust, forgiveness, remorse, tolerance, sin, violence and death—these are just some of the themes engaged in The ,Ballad of Jack and Rose....
Bunkered down
Guilt and remorse over Nazi atrocities and the horrors of World War II have consumed Germany for decades, influencing politics, culture and the arts, including cinema....
Trusting and believing
A pair of British imports explores faith of different kinds. Millions, directed by Danny Boyle from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, is by far the slicker of the two....
Kids with cameras
Zana Briski is a New York photojournalist who went to India in 1995 to document the plight of women in a patriarchal society....
Room at the inn
In 1994 Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in Kigali, Rwanda, risked his life to help save more than 1,200 men, women and children from the ethnic cleansing that wiped out nearly 1 million Rwandans...
Standard deviation
When Alfred Charles Kinsey was hired as an assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University in 1920, he began a two-decade study of the gall wasp, collecting over 1 million samples....
Make believe
Scottish writer James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) was a great success during his lifetime, with 40 plays, six novels and numerous works of nonfiction to his name....