Jean-Luc Godard

++++++++++++++++++++ || || ++++++++++++++++++++ How ironic -- yet oddly fitting -- that Michelangelo Antonioni should die in Italy, at 94, the day after Ingmar Bergman died at 89 in Sweden. At the time of their deaths they were arguably Europe's two...

Charles Teitel, who operated one of the first foreign art houses in Chicago, screening such seminal films as "The Bicycle Thief" and "Z" as well as movies that city censors tried to ban for racy content, died of congestive heart failure April 4 at his...

Jean-LUC GODARD structures "Notre Musique," his profound and challenging meditation on war, into Dante's three Kingdoms: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. In confronting war on many levels — visceral, intellectual, political, philosophical, cultural &#...

The exquisite and overwhelming emotional tapestry that is "The Sweet Hereafter" plays its credits over the simplest and most primal of scenes. An infant and its parents, unclothed and drowsy under white sheets, share the same quiet bed. It's a pristine...

Friday April 3, 1998      Pascal Aubier's irresistible "Son of Gascogne" puts a smile on your face and keeps it there. This French charmer involves young love, an intricate comedy plot and an homage to vintage New Wave stars and directors.      It's...

Friday April 17, 1998      The very least we expect from conventional screen storytellers is that they will entice us into caring about their people. More talented and daring filmmakers, however, take on the challenge of involving us in individuals...

Friday January 27, 1995      Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are in practically every frame of "Before Sunrise," so it's a good thing they're so engaging.      In the end, they never become much * more than engaging, but the characters' deeply-felt...

In the thirty-five years since its American release, Jean-Luc Godard's lyrical gangster romance "Band of Outsiders" has been as difficult to revisit as it is impossible to forget. Starting today, the first part of that equation is going to change. Rialto...

Friday May 31, 1996      Mark Rappaport's venturesome "From the Journals of Jean Seberg" imagines that the ill-fated actress, an apparent suicide in 1979 at age 40, has risen from the grave to tell us the story of her roller coaster life. Mary Beth...

Outrageous without being offensive, provocatively and unapologetically sexual, alive to the possibilities of life and cinema, Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mama Tambien" is a sophisticated film happily masquerading as something off the cuff. Nominally a...

Thursday December 12, 1996      The ridiculous 14 years that it's taken Michelangelo Antonioni's sublime "Identification of a Woman" to open here merely underlines the timelessness and modernity of one of the world's greatest living directors.      ...

Friday February 14, 1997      Michael Benson's "Predictions of Fire" is a provocative, dense and demanding exploration of the relationship of art, politics and war as it has been played out over the turbulent 20th century in what was once Yugoslavia.   ...