Chris Wisniewski
Maybe sometime in the next decade, the Iraq War will get its Platoon or its Full Metal Jacket, but for now, we’ll have to keep waiting for a memorably incisive, dramatically successful cinematic treatment—at least, from a fiction film.
Udi Aloni's Forgiveness asserts its political ambitions early, with an opening title scroll that tells of a Palestinian village, whose inhabitants were slaughtered by an Israeli militia in 1948.
At one point, Alex drags the others to dinner at an exclusively lesbian restaurant, and I was left wondering, first, if any such places exist in real life (seriously, I don’t think they do), and second, why any of these women were having dinner with each other in the first place.
Hou’s films have never tethered themselves to three-act structures or straightforward narrative storytelling; rather, the director tends to privilege visuality over narrative, mise-en-scène and character over plot and event. Millennium Mambo takes these impulses to an extreme.
Have we forgotten how to watch movie musicals? Forget about whether or not they make them like they used to—they don’t, and they haven’t for about 50 years.
A common criticism of the series has been its tendency to depict women as behaving “like gay men.” The charge is troubling not least for its reification of stereotypes of gay male promiscuity but also for its subtle assertion that ideal femininity doesn't square with unbridled—or at least, uncomplicated—sexual desire.
To set a movie like Days of Heaven next to something like The New World is to compare two films that have been assembled with completely different technologies.
Some documentarians aim to answer and resolve, but Morris is almost too content to leave us adrift in ambiguity, regardless of the political, moral, and epistemological repercussions.
Charlie Wilson's War works overtime in its brisk 97 minutes to entertain and edify in equal parts, but Nichols never manages to find a balanced tone, particularly in his depiction of the war.
A satire about the now-dying medium of broadcast television, inspired by the then-timely true story of a New Hampshire woman who convinced her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, To Die For is an artifact of a passed cultural moment.
A Few Great Pumpkins
Inferno, Cujo, The Devil Rides Out, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Paperhouse, Trouble Every Day, The Others, Halloween
Clocking in at under 90 minutes, and deploying no voiceover, Useless is actually a deceptively modest piece of work—some may call it "minor"—but its modesty should not be taken for lack of ambition or for a failure on Jia’s part to grapple with his film’s subjects. Instead, Jia has crafted something beautiful, expansive, and deeply philosophical.
As a straightforward genre picture, it's plodding and dull, but as timely political intervention, it's too diffuse. Elah ends up being about many things and nothing at the same time.
To take a broad view of it, the new Simpsons Movie is a product—and a successful bid at brand reinvigoration.
Becoming Jane would have us believe that Austen, played here by the perennially boring Anne Hathaway, was nothing less, or more, than a watered-down variation on one of her own heroines.
Rope can be seen as a denial of the edit, a kind of negation or repudiation of its importance and power. At the same time, the presence of the cut despite its elision, its status as “not there but there,” could be seen as the definitive test and proof of the very centrality Rope seems to deny.
The biopic, however uninteresting, is among the most schizophrenic of film genres: at the level of performance, the push is always towards verisimilitude—imitation in speech and gait, appearance, and, when the subject is a musician, song—while at the level of narrative, there’s an almost mechanical adherence to formula.
In one sense, my descent from lofty aesthetics to base pleasures, from unsettling ambiguity to simple rapture, and from intellectual engagement to visceral thrill, flies in the face of expectation: Don’t we respond more powerfully and more deeply to works of art upon repeated exposure to them?
"I live in this society, and all my subjects come from things I see around me and things that affect me personally. And this also came from something that happened to me personally. I wanted to go see a soccer game a few years ago, and my daughter, who was twelve years old at the time, wanted to go with me."
These women aren’t (consciously) feminists, and, more profoundly, their defiance isn’t even explicitly political. These women are soccer fans.