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Arnaud Desplechin

Reviews

Deception (2022)
Ismael's Ghosts (2018)
My Golden Days (2016)
Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)
Jimmy P. (2014)

Blog Posts

Ebert Club

#301 May 2, 2017

Matt writes: Last month's 19th installment of Ebertfest in Champaign, Illinois, was a tremendous joy from beginning to end. Our special guests included Norman Lear ("All in the Family"), Isabelle Huppert ("Elle"), Charles Burnett ("Killer of Sheep"), Gary Ross ("Pleasantville"), cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("Being There"), first assistant director Michael Hausman ("Hair") and Oscar-winning producer Irwin Winkler ("Rocky"). We have compiled our site's complete coverage of the festival into a table of contents, accompanied by several excellent articles from Champaign's newspaper, The News-Gazette. Our special edition of Thumbnails features additional coverage of the festival published at Variety, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Illini, Smile Politely and more. So grab some popcorn and join us in reliving the highlights of Ebertfest 2017.

Ebert Club

#168 May 22, 2013

Marie writes: Now this is really neat. It made TIME's top 25 best blogs for 2012 and with good reason. Behold artist and photographer Gustaf Mantel's Tumblr blog "If we don't, remember me" - a collection of animated GIFs based on classic films. Only part of the image moves and in a single loop; they're sometimes called cinemagraphs. The results can be surprisingly moving. They also can't be embedded so you have to watch them on his blog. I already picked my favorite. :-)

Scanners

Apes and allegories: What is the meaning of this?!

A horror or science-fiction movie without subtext is like Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory without electricity. The inner metaphor is what gives it life and resonance. Otherwise, it's just a story about stitched-together people parts. Or take David Cronenberg's "The Fly," a riveting, poignant horror/science-fiction/romance about an ambitious scientist who accidentally gets his DNA mixed up with that of a housefly. Everything about the movie is first-rate, from the direction to the performances to the effects. But what really grabs hold of you is the universal theme: We are all Brundlefly, sentient, self-aware beings whose bodies are going to decay and die. In 1986, a lot of people assumed the subtext was AIDS; Cronenberg later said he was thinking in more general terms about the process of aging. It doesn't matter. The movie works on those levels.

Cronenberg is particularly ingenious at making the word flesh, and the ways he develops his ideas are often even scarier than the explicit horrors: "The Brood" is a masterpiece about the psychosomatic effects of rage turned inward, and about the legacy of emotional abuse passed down from one generation to the next; "Videodrome" is about technology as an extension of the body and the brain; "Dead Ringers" is about mutant forms of psychological and sexual intimacy; "Naked Lunch" is about a writer who has to internalize his own sexuality before he can create art.... Cronenberg is an organic, visionary thinker, storyteller, filmmaker. His movies have meat on their bones. Other filmmakers whose work strikes me as insubstantial lack this ability to flesh-out their pictures with compelling, animating ideas. Their plots are meticulously plotted, but they're skin-deep and there's nothing to sink your imaginative teeth into.

Which brings me to this summer's hits, "Transformers: Dark of the Moon" and "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," neither of which I have much interest in seeing. Instead I'm intrigued by a few things I've read about them -- specifically about their subtext, or lack thereof. In a piece about the racial themes of "The Help" ("Why Can't Critics Just Get Along?"), David Poland writes: