My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews

Critic Lopate (A Year and a Day) opines on the films of Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer, and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, in this splendid collection. The commentary is uniformly celebratory, as when Lopate lauds Dreyer’s “gliding camera movements” in Gertrud and Tarkovsky’s ability to “crash through the surface of ordinary life” with long, unbroken takes that capture “deeper truths underlying the ephemeral moment.” Elsewhere, Lopate recounts how he found Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort “thin and insubstantial” upon the film’s release but came to appreciate its value “as a painful fairy tale about yearning” after rewatching the musical decades later. Though there’s disappointingly few female filmmakers featured, Lopate does praise Lena Dunham’s debut, Tiny Furniture, for its realistic portrayal of young adulthood, as well as Chantal Akerman’s documentary No Home Movie for its tender portrait of the director’s relationship with her elderly mother. Elsewhere, Lopate expounds on Bergman’s “muzzy affection for human frailty” in Scenes from a Marriage, David Lynch’s surrealist flourishes in Mulholland Drive, and Yasujirō Ozu’s dramatization of parent-child conflict in Late Spring. The essays breeze by, enlivened by Lopate’s punchy prose and palpable love of cinema. Cinephiles will cherish this. (July)