Author Archives: Patrick Z. McGavin

Initially promising, this 2002 Spanish thriller by Miguel Albaladejo deteriorates steadily, turning nasty and stupid in the final reel. In a sleepy coastal community a brittle singer (Lolita Flores) recognizes a small businessman (Jorge Perugorria) as a criminal she knew a decade earlier. Unwilling to allow him to turn over a new leaf, she sets […]

Nathalie Richard, who has done superb work with Jacques Rivette and Olivier Assayas, is the primary reason to see this 1999 black-and-white feature from director-writer David Barker. She plays a Frenchwoman who’s been permanently injured in a car accident and now suffers from agoraphobia, which effectively traps her in the New York loft where she […]

A spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to weld Hollywood slickness onto the regionalist sensibility of its American Film Institute backing, this embarrassing work hasn’t an original thought to speak of. Writer-director Brett Thompson has appropriated plot movements and visual motifs straight out of The Seventh Seal, Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, 9

This welcome return to filmmaking by Ingmar Bergman, originally broadcast on Swedish television in 1998, doesn’t qualify as a major work, but as an auteurist piece it’s indispensable. It was shot in digital beta video, which gives the images a flat, highly theatrical texture and severely restricts the formal possibilities of the material—the mise-en-scene seems […]