Autumn Sonata

91/100

By 1978, Ingmar Bergman was in trouble. The director had fled his native Sweden two years earlier after an arrest on charges of tax evasion. (He would be completely exonerated in 1979, but his mood was no doubt grim until then.) He visited Paris and Los Angeles, then settled in Munich, where he would shoot his first English-language film, the 1920s Berlin-set The Serpent’s Egg, a Dino de Laurentiis co-production co-starring David Carradine and Bergman stalwart Liv Ullmann. The Serpent’s Egg was a box-office flop in Sweden, a critical and commercial failure internationally, and most of all a big artistic disappointment for Bergman himself-a decided stumble for a director riding high on the success of 1970s titles like the harrowing Cries and Whispers, which enjoyed huge success in the U.S. in the unlikely care of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and the audience-friendly The Magic Flute. At the same time, Bergman was embarking on what would prove to be an unhappy tenure at Munich’s Residenztheater, where he managed to mount eleven productions before being fired in 1981. In this turbulent context, the very Bergmanesque Autumn Sonata can be seen as a kind of comfort film-a deliberate return to roots. Someone once described it as “Bergman does Bergman,” and the gag stuck. Bergman himself eventually quoted the remark, calling it “witty but unfortunate. For me, that is.”

Continue reading

Stoker

68/100

Visually this is so rich that it’s a shame I didn’t care much about the characters, especially once the obligatory revelatory flashbacks started unspooling. Park’s oddly cropped compositions and strangely timed edits have a discomfiting elegance that goes a long way, but he’s less in control of story — which is not as important in an exercise buoyed by flamboyance (cf. Oldboy) than it is in the kind of Hitchcockian suspense thriller Stoker occasionally emulates. Still, as female coming-of-age yarns go, this one is suitably creepy and appropriately nails a sensation of being turned on by the bad boys, though you know they’ll bite you once they get under your skirt.