Ian Birnie

  • print December 2009

    Ian Birnie

    IAN BIRNIE

    1 Vincere (Marco Bellocchio) Mussolini’s scorned “first wife” descends into madness while Italy rushes to crown the Duce. Mixing Soviet montage, Expressionist lighting, silent films, newsreels, melodrama, and parody, Vincere plunges the viewer into the black hole of Fascism.

    2 The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) In a north German village ca. 1914, evil walks among the farmers and sits down with the teacher, the baron, the doctor, the midwife, the pastor, and their flaxen-haired offspring. Angst-meister Haneke’s tale of twisted Protestants and patriarchs is impossible to shake.

    3 Modern

  • print December 2002

    Ian Birnie

    IAN BIRNIE

    1. Merci pour le chocolat (Claude Chabrol) Merci to Chabrol for this master class in the elegant use of mise-en-scène to subtly reveal character and create drama.

    2. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar) Sex for Almodóvar is like murder for Chabrol: It’s a key to the mysteries of the human heart.

    3. Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov) A cinematic enigma, an epic piece of Brechtian theater, themes that overlap and build like a nineteenth-century symphony—a haunting experience.

    4. Gerry (Gus Van Sant) This existential buddy film is an aesthetic about-face for Van Sant and a welcome return to the mordant

  • film December 2001

    Ian Birnie

    IAN BIRNIE

    1. Va Savoir (Jacques Rivette) A luminous comedy of manners that follows six characters in search of an exit—from themselves, their lovers, and their routine. As satisfying as Lubitsch.

    2. Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr) Innocence is destroyed in Tarr’s enigmatic and hypnotic survey of human weakness and cruelty, set in a desolate Hungarian village.

    3. My Voyage to Italy (Martin Scorsese) Only a great director could turn four hours of clips—even from these masterpieces of Italian cinema—into a coherent, compelling drama addressing personal, cultural, and aesthetic concerns.

    4. L’Emploi

  • film December 2000

    Ian Birnie

    IAN BIRNIE

    1. You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan) The most accomplished of this year’s American indie debuts.

    2. Chunhyang (Im Kwon-taek) From Korea, a completely original, magisterial work that combines sung narration with ravishing images.

    3. Chicken Run (Peter Lord and Nick Park) The Ealing comedy is alive and well and living in claymation.

    4. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai) A concerto for two ill-starred couples and pure pleasure for the senses. Elegant, restrained, stylized, brilliantly sure of itself from its first frame to its astonishing epiphany at Angkor Wat.

    5. Long Night’s Journey