Betsy Sherman

Maggie Cheung Is Superb in “Clean”

June 9, 2006
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A prickly woman’s survival depends on her ability to soften her edges in this riveting drama by Olivier Assayas, for which Maggie Cheung won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. Assayas began his career by making incisive and unsentimental character studies. His technique became freer in his first collaboration with…

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Film Review: A Pleasant “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont”

June 8, 2006
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By Betsy Sherman As a film about a brief, cross-generational friendship, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (now playing at the Kendall Square Cinema) doesn’t have the pop-culture cachet of Lost in Translation or Harold and Maude. It’s content to nestle into an ambiguously etched contemporary London in which people quote Wordsworth and make a fuss…

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Film Review: “Stolen” Beauty

May 10, 2006
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A gorgeous documentary examines the 1990 heist of priceless art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. By Betsy Sherman It must be hard to decide at what point to undertake a documentary about an ongoing investigation. What if events conspire to make the film you’ve shot seem half-baked, or even irrelevant? Rebecca Dreyfus’ “Stolen,” about…

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Film Review: Still in Bondage — Movies About Slavery, post Civil War

February 22, 2006
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Two new films explore the provocative premise that slavery in America didn’t end after the Civil War.

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Film Review: “Caché” — Nowhere To Hide

January 11, 2006
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Michael Haneke’s sharp and timely thriller explores how the shadows of a man’s past can come back to haunt him with a vengeance.

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Film Review: “Match Point” — A Winning Serve

January 6, 2006
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Woody Allen’s freshest and most potent film in years manages to be much more than an erotic thriller. By Betsy Sherman Woody Allen’s cinema of the past 10 years has been one of quaint fetishes. True, his passion for early jazz resulted in the hilarious “Sweet and Lowdown,” but aside from that movie and the…

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Film Review: “North Country” — Of Sex and Harassment

October 19, 2005
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The new film North Country gives superb dramatic life to a fictionalized version of the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in the U.S. By Betsy Sherman Niki Caro’s last movie on female empowerment, Whale Rider, was about an exotic culture and centered on an irresistible girl with royal blood in her veins. Caro’s new film…

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Film Commentary: The Cinema of Japanese Mikio Naruse — Pitfalls of Desire

September 28, 2005
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By Betsy Sherman The films of the neglected Japanese master Mikio Naruse spotlight the plight of women on the margins of society. “Mikio Naruse: A Centennial Tribute” will be screened from Sept. 28 through Oct. 30, 2005 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA and from Sept. 30 through Oct. 10, 2005 at…

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