Story and You

(image via Variety)             There is no question that most moviegoers watch movies to be entertained. Film has always been a medium of entertainment, and even critics are not immune to the pleasures of a day of escapism at the cinema; even the prestigious Sight and Sound lists, mainly comprised of challenging arthouse classics such as Au Hasard Balthazar and The Passion of Joan of Arc, makes room for such audience-pleasing works as Singin' in the Rain and Some Like It Hot . However, despite their challenging nature, Balthazar and Passion can also be considered pleasurable in their own ways, offering deeper insights into society and human nature through the tragedies they present. But what happens when both "entertaining" and "pleasurable" are replaced by “uncomfortable”? Can the quality of a film be diminished by the discomfort it evokes in the viewer? These are important questions in assessing the critical response to Una ...

(image via IFC Center) Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door? is a film made by someone who loves films. This is no news to anyone today, but it is impossible to believe that anyone watching this directorial debut even back in 1968 could have mistaken this for anything else but the product of a man born and bred on film stock. The film itself is a minor effort in the grand scheme of Scorsese’s filmography, eclipsed by many later films that are more distinctly “Scorsese” and less broadly influenced by other filmmakers. However, it evidences the great confidence inherent in the works of this first generation of filmmakers who grew up going to the cinema, and it also begins to explore thematic material that would later become iconic in Scorsese’s distinct breed of filmmaking.             Shot in black-and-white at the time when color photography was widely being adopted, the film offers an appealing sense of nosta...

(image via The Guardian) The 1995 French film La Haine fits comfortably in the longstanding tradition of realist filmmaking in Europe, but it uses these traditional conventions to tell an entirely modern story, highlighting painful realities regarding the link between racism and violence in the late 20th-century. While La Haine's visual style evokes the stark, gritty black-and-white iconography made famous by the Italian neorealism movement in the 1940s and 50s, this stylistic decision is not merely an homage to European film history: it is a choice made for the express purpose of contrasting the characters with their environment, furthering the themes of the narrative through visual storytelling. The sparse black-and-white images initially appear to bring order and to assure an adherence to a "safe", classical style of filmmaking, but this sense of order is quickly dismissed as unattainable as the film's violent world is revealed. One visually notable scene see...