“Petulia” was the last film Roeg shot before he turned his attention to directing, and that movie’s atmosphere of unease, as well as its French New Wave-influenced vocabulary of flashbacks and flash-forwards, clearly became aesthetic foundations of his own work. From his 1973 horror masterpiece, “Don’t Look Now,” to his twisty, flashback-laden 1980 thriller, “Bad Timing,” Roeg often delighted in stringing scenes and moments together in ways that defied conventional narrative logic, and not just for the sake of a showily nonlinear presentation. Few directors were as good at evoking a sense of the world being ruptured from within, or forcing their formal syntax to mirror the jagged, violent stories they were telling.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 25, 2018 21:35 UTC