Films I Watched This Week — Mar 3–9, 2025
Persona (1966)
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is one of those fascinating films that you keep returning to, trying to uncover more of its mysteries and hoping it reveals more of its secrets. It is the quintessential example of the art film, and they’re several times within the story where Bergman is informing the audience what is real and what is fantasy. Persona gives no clear answers, its conclusion is left ambiguous, and everyone's interpretation of the film can differ based upon each person’s perspective. The best approach when watching Persona is to try and not dissect every scene and rather focus on the underlying power struggles between its two characters. The film explores the roles a person chooses to play in their life and the questions one has about their own identity, all the while exposing our sins, torments and secrets we keep to ourselves and rarely share with others.
The Runner (1984)
A postrevolutionary Iranian film about a young orphan fending for himself on the streets of a port in the city. The boy takes odd jobs like collecting empty bottles and shining shoes while passing time with friends racing each other alongside moving trains. Its a powerful neorealism film which was inspired by the directors own childhood.
My Brother's Wedding (1983)
Prince of the City (1981)
His name is Daniel Ciello. He is a New York cop who chooses, for idealistic reasons, to expose corruption in the police force. He will give testimonies and secret tape recordings, which will indict 52 other guys in various police units. He will tell them all about how narcotics cops skim money from criminals and string out drug addicts to use them as inforcers so they can buy information. But he has a code. Right from the beginning, he makes it very clear that he will not rat on his partners within his own unit. His unit is part of a special trafficking police force called Prince of the City, largely because they are left unsupervised and given wide latitude to make cases against defendants. His partners are more than his friends. They are his family. "I sleep with my wife, but I live with my partners," he tells investigators, who amongst each other have their own slimy agendas, setting an inexorable trap, which will find Ciello forever regretting sticking his neck out. Prince of the City presents not only the moral dilemma of the informant but of the prosecutors, who, through manipulation, cutting deals, and breaking promises, will grind this man down and crush his spirit, simply to build their cases. Sidney Lumet, the director of Serpico, another film about a police officer who wants to go straight, is the only director who could have told such a story. Lumet makes what could have been a simple police procedural into a much deeper piece about the morals of a man who through stress, fatigue and inner turmoil, inevitably finds himself falling to pieces for breaking the only code he lives by, all the while taking his partners down with him.
Tokyo Olympiad (1965)
Kon Ichikawa's 1965's Tokyo Olympiad remains one of the greatest documentaries ever made about sports. Supervising a vast team of technicians using multiple cameras, Ichikawa captured the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo in glorious widescreen images, using cutting-edge telephoto lenses and slow motion to create a poetic perspective of the drama. Tokyo Olympics is a wonderful documentary that remains a historical document not just of an event but also of a time and place and a culture.
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