Films Worth Seeing

Araya. Made in 1959, acclaimed at Cannes but skimpily released, this exceptional documentary is very deservedly brought forth again. Shot in stunning black and white, this account of salt workers on the coast of Venezuela tells the truth about their lives in quasi-poetic style. (Reviewed 11/4/09)

Disgrace

Paladin

The Other Man

Image Entertainment

J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has been made into a film that, in good measure, is faithful to it. Along with the admiration that obviously drew them to the book, the film-makers had to deal with some heavy data. Coetzee is a Nobel laureate; Disgrace won a lofty British award called the Booker Prize; an English newspaper poll lately named Disgrace as the best novel of the last twenty-five years. Aesthetically dubious though such tags are, nonetheless the book has been a favorite of many good readers over many years.

• Ending our Age of Suffering: A Plan to Stop Genocide Once and For All, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
• Kauffmann: Two Great Films About Adulterers, by Stanley Kauffmann
• The Case Against Government Transparency, by Law

TNR film critic Stanley Kauffmann expresses regret about some of his earlier pieces of criticism. Try to guess what this refers to: "I've been more embarassed about that privately than anything else I've ever written...".

TNR's Stanley Kauffmann breaks down the changes in film criticism over the past century, and argues that the medium is uniquely universal.

 Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

IFC Entertainment

35 Shots of Rum

Cinema Guild

David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men has been adapted for the screen. Well, parts of it have been adapted--chiefly, the four parts that bear the same title as the book and the film. Wallace’s book is a miscellany of prose outbursts, some that soar in known styles, some that fling aside known styles, some of deliberate wildness. The book evokes much the same reaction as does Godard. Godard’s films often convey that he thought his film-making talent was a curse; that he was doomed to use that talent in prescribed patterns, that he must try to explode those film-making patterns as drastically as possible yet still make his talent evident--at least, by letting viewers know that he was protesting. (For much the same reason, I thought, the avant-garde musician Henry Cowell played parts of his pieces with his elbows.)