Pictureland

"So this is your wilderness...Detroit."  So says Eve to Adam as they drive by night through the moribund Motor City in a white Jaguar.   Only Lovers Left Alive is not, as it happens, an update of the book of Genesis that Jim Jarmusch has overlaid onto the urban wasteland of Detroit.  The action  Only Lovers Left Alive occurs by night, as Adam and Eve are vampires.  While they're not the primeval lovers of the Bible, the names do obviously carry significance.  Mr. Jarmusch's eleventh feature is an elegaic one, lamenting not only the tenuous existence of analog recording, lovely old guitars and other beautiful objects, but the looming loss of our very own paradise of a planet. There would seem a certain inevitability in Detroit if you happen to be a vampire.  What better place to take up residence?  A city built for two million now now home 700,000. It is in significant ways -  figurative and quite literal - a city of night.  Former...

Terence Davies latest film, The Deep Blue Sea , is an adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play of the same name.  As I have contemplated Mr. Davies' film, both prior to and since attending a screening, I find myself thinking of yet another Terrence, America's great filmmaker of the same (if spelled slightly differently) first name.  This, of course, the redoubtable Mr. Malick.  Both filmmakers are visual poets, after a  fashion.  Both seem individualists, if not iconoclasts, uncompromising as to when and how they make films.  Most significantly, whatever each man might have to say about the human condition, he does so with stories very much removed from the present day. The settings for the films for which each man are best know are superficially quite different.  The natural world has always figured prominently in Malick's films, from Badlands  through The Tree of Life .  Davies most often has us in one English room or another.  A...