Gerard Brach

There's an air of mystery about screenwriter Gerard Brach, and it makes just getting to see him something of an event. He doesn't do power lunches, take meetings, or give interviews, as a rule. In fact, if you don't know someone in his inner circle--directors Jean-Jacques Annaud, Claude Berri, Roman Polanski--forget it. You'll never find him. The mystery deepens when Brach opens the door to his Paris apartment and greets you with a cautious smile. He's about five feet four, spry.

Roman Polanski's second feature, and his first after emigrating from communist Poland, "Repulsion" quivers with liberated energy and forces both cathartic and annihilating. Detailing the abrupt mental deterioration of a nail-chomping beautician named Carole, played by Catherine Deneuve, the 1965 film, due out in a new DVD and Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection on Tuesday, is consistently engrossing, even though, or perhaps because, it is essentially one long Freudian gag.

Roman Polanski's second feature, and his first after emigrating from communist Poland, "Repulsion" quivers with liberated energy and forces both cathartic and annihilating. Detailing the abrupt mental deterioration of a nail-chomping beautician named Carole, played by Catherine Deneuve, the 1965 film, due out in a new DVD and Blu-ray edition from the Criterion Collection on Tuesday, is consistently engrossing, even though, or perhaps because, it is essentially one long Freudian gag.

There's an air of mystery about screenwriter Gerard Brach, and it makes just getting to see him something of an event. He doesn't do power lunches, take meetings, or give interviews, as a rule. In fact, if you don't know someone in his inner circle--directors Jean-Jacques Annaud, Claude Berri, Roman Polanski--forget it. You'll never find him. The mystery deepens when Brach opens the door to his Paris apartment and greets you with a cautious smile. He's about five feet four, spry.

Our first glimpse of Walter Matthau in Roman Polanski's "Pirates" (citywide) is on a raft adrift in the Caribbean. What a splendid sight he is: Dressed in filthy 17th-Century finery, full-bearded, a glint in his eye, Matthau's wily and notorious Capt. Thomas Bartholomew Red is instantly a real pirate. And when he opens his mouth, his low-class English accent has a glorious Leo McKern/Michael Hordern sound to it. Alas, would that "Pirates" were as inspired as the casting of Matthau.

A breath of frosty morning air gently sweeps through the valley, rustling brittle autumn leaves and sending a flurry tumbling down the mountainside in an orange, yellow and red waterfall. They settle at the base of a mountain, not far from a log cabin that was hand-framed by Mormon pioneers in 1879. Doug and Lynne Seus are relaxing inside the restored cabin as their son Clint Youngreen prepares a fire in a blackened pot-belly stove.

I turned a critical corner in my life when I read that beautiful piece by Laurence B. Chollet ("The Man Who Wouldn't Go Out," Dec. 18). Like Gerard Brach, I, too, suffer from agoraphobia. And as a result of all the therapeutic handoffs of well-meaning friends, I've always thought of myself as an unmanly coward. I've made breast-beating excuses and told a lot of lies to get out of dates, turned down big career opportunities and, like Brach, even experienced lost love. By now, I'm tired of hearing that I'm not motivated and "if you really want to see me, you'd come visit" by people who will never understand.

It's not uncommon for screenwriters to disown movies when they feel directors have failed to do their words justice. But Marguerite Duras, the eminent French novelist and screenwriter, has gone one better. She was so dismayed by the adaptation by director Jean-Jacques Annaud of her best-selling novel "L'Amant" (published in the United States as "The Lover") that she has written another version of the book in response to Annaud's movie.

POLANSKI ESTABLISHED his reputation early on with such award-winning shorts as "Two Men and a Wardrobe" (1958) and "Mammals" (1962). The violence and sexual undercurrents in these would resurface in later full-length films. "KNIFE IN THE WATER" (1962).

A breath of frosty morning air gently sweeps through the valley, rustling brittle autumn leaves and sending a flurry tumbling down the mountainside in an orange, yellow and red waterfall. They settle at the base of a mountain, not far from a log cabin that was hand-framed by Mormon pioneers in 1879. Doug and Lynne Seus are relaxing inside the restored cabin as their son Clint Youngreen prepares a fire in a blackened pot-belly stove.

Our first glimpse of Walter Matthau in Roman Polanski's "Pirates" (citywide) is on a raft adrift in the Caribbean. What a splendid sight he is: Dressed in filthy 17th-Century finery, full-bearded, a glint in his eye, Matthau's wily and notorious Capt. Thomas Bartholomew Red is instantly a real pirate. And when he opens his mouth, his low-class English accent has a glorious Leo McKern/Michael Hordern sound to it. Alas, would that "Pirates" were as inspired as the casting of Matthau.

In "Shy People," which opens a one-week Oscar-qualifying run today at the Century City 14, director Andrei Konchalovsky envisions a cataclysmic confrontation between a shallow, sophisticated New Yorker and a puritanical, uneducated Louisiana bayou matriarch. The result is a cataclysm, for sure--but not in the profoundly earth-shaking sense that Konchalovsky intended.

"The Lover" is easy to watch and even easier to forget. A pleasant enough piece of commercial sensuality from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, its selling point is its very pretty, clothing-optional sex scenes. Their effectiveness, however, is undercut by an air of self-congratulatory pomposity that the film is way too insubstantial to support.