IN EARLY CHILDHOOD Ben was diagnosed with a mild form of autism. His mother, who loves him dearly, is determined to help him move through the terrors of life in a high school where bullies torment him and classmates laugh at his suffering....

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR Written and directed by Robert Bresson October 17 through 30, Film Forum THE LORD'S BRAYER Robert Bresson puts the ass in classic with his 1966 masterwork about a saintly donkey To cut to the chase, Robert Bresson's heartbreaking and magnificent...

As he did with Balthazar, Keith McNally has once again set a stage where the play is about eating and the actors are the diners. This time it’s not a Paris bistro, but a rustic trattoria somewhere in the hills of Italy. Morandi’s low, beamed...

Dana Vachon, the 28-year-old banker turned blogger turned novelist about town, was not wearing socks. Just loafers. A buttery brown leather pair that may or may not have been Gucci and cocooned his feet to reveal just the manliest hint of hair-sprinkled skin. Set against...

[The] novelty of [Au Hasard, Balthazar] lies less in the wealth of happenings than in the eye, that veiled but disenchanted eye, which Bresson turns on the modern world. The price of progress in this mechanical age is la civilisation du weekend…. Here Bresson clips the wings from critical comments like "irrelevant to the times," "more and more withdrawn from the world." For if the dancers (us?) in the café sequence seem indifferent to the fiendish destruction which ...

After the manifold splendours of Balthazar, Mouchette seems an altogether thinner experience, exquisite but frail, as though Bresson this time had chosen to tell only the story of Marie without the counterpoint of Balthazar. Unlike the earlier film, which develops as a series of concentric circles spreading from the tethered souls of Marie and Balthazar, Mouchette … drives straight as an arrow towards its inevitable end in Mouchette's abdication from life…. At the same time, by any othe...