Review
We return to my coverage of the 25th annual Boston Underground Film Festival, our own little local celebration of oddballs, freaks, and celluloid weirdos of all sorts.
What is most striking here is Paul Bley’s patience as a pianist, his practice of playing a chord or even a couple of notes and letting them hang in the air as if he were an outside observer, listening to their gradual fading.
Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s towering achievement is to show that, while Nicholas II was betrayed, he lost his throne because he had made it impossible for anyone who loved Russia to be loyal to him.
Director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film is a darkly hilarious, polymorphously perverse paean to compassion.
Considering the current political climate and its accompanying cultural backlashes, BUFF’s (continued) commitment to diversity in film feels especially pointed in its 25th incarnation.
Here’s hoping that Adam Sherman and Robin Lane remain a creative item and continue to write and record new material. Both are in late-career resurgences and have devoted fans that fill the smaller clubs they typically perform in to the brim.
Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of an ordinary soldier’s life in the trenches of WWI remains shocking and shattering today.
A pair of pleasant traversals of the French master’s complete piano music, or thereabout, from the still-relative-newcomer Seong-Jin Cho and the established Jean-Efflam Bavouzet.
Violinist James Ehnes and the BBC Philharmonic supply some truly great performances; violinist Benjamin Schmid revels in composer Friedrich Gulda’s freewheeling sense of play.
The Russian dramatist’s expansive application of ridicule, his picture of human society as an endless chain of fools fooling fools fooling fools, couldn’t be more fitting — it is a funhouse mirror of our times.
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