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Kiss Me Deadly: A Classic Film Noir with a Twist  By Arnold Anthony Schmid Admit it: when you think about film noir, you don’t associate it with the nineteenth-century Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti! Yet the suggestive role played by Rossetti’s 1862 sonnet “Remember” in Kiss Me Deadly illustrates only one of the many things that make […]

“A Road Trip With a Twist: Compartment No. 6”  By Arnold Anthony Schmidt  Like many, I particularly enjoy narratives in which audiences first see characters as one kind of person, only to have them end up as quite a different kind entirely. Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment No. 6 (2021), winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes […]

“Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” by Arnold Schmidt Films by Iranian Asghar Farhadi, one of the few directors to win two Oscars in the Best Foreign Language category, generally revolve around people making difficult, perhaps unresolvable, decisions. His most famous, the Oscar-winning 2011 A Separation, follows a family in which the […]

By: Arnold Anthony Schmidt

“Life in the Rear-view Mirror”
(Drive My Car)

When a movie has a title with the word “drive” in it, audiences expect highspeed chases, acrobatic escapes, and catastrophic car crashes. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s elegiac Drive My Car has none of those physical actions, but it will definitely carry viewers along on an emotional ride, with lovers trying to chase memories and escape regrets, only to experience catastrophic psychological impacts in the end.