Dan Conley

“Mirror” saves its most puzzling segment for the last. As noted previously, one reason why this film is so psychologically rich is that it avoids psychoanalytic language. Tarkovsky navigates the terrain of his unconscious without attaching labels to it — so we are free to associate these images with religion, culture

That discussion with the landlady hit Mrs. Chow hard. When Mr. Chan called her to ask when she could meet again to work on the stories — that the editor is getting antsy for new copy — she told him that the landlady gave her a lecture and that she wouldn’t

It becomes impossible to decipher “Mirror” at this point. The camera opens in black and white on the face of a man who seems like something out of an impressionistic silent movie. He stands beside Maroussia, who is levitating. As if that isn’t ethereal enough, there’s a voice

I’ve noticed that I am writing about increasingly smaller chunks of this movie at a time. “In The Mood for Love” is constructed like a Chinese meal, with tiny bites of film designed to be picked up with chop sticks. We get another musical interlude. Our protagonists are collaborating

I have seen some more 2025 movies since I put out my 10 best list. Only one of them cracks my top 10 — a 5 1/2 hour documentary by Julia Loktev called “My Undesirable Friends, Part One.” Yes, it’s 5 1/2 hours and the movie isn’t

It’s hard enough to write about “Mirror” by itself. It reaches a new level of complexity when Tarkovsky decides to pay tribute to Swedish cinematic master Ingmar Bergman and his 1966 classic “Persona.” I wrote a bit about “Persona” in essay 7 of this series, but only scratched the