Reviews
Basically a hateful litany of bad behavior inelegantly strung together into a moralizing allegory it vapidly posits as quintessentially “American,” Ball’s wretched pageant is precociously vile.
Why go back to the seventeenth century to tell a tale of love? Why lament the Forez plain when there is yet such natural beauty in the world as cinematographer Diane Baratier finds here?
The value of a film like Chris Smith's The Pool becomes more tangible when you begin to imagine what a lesser filmmaker might have wrought from the same material.
Django, Tarantino, Miike: These names alone are enough to tell anyone whether or not Sukiyaki Western Django isfor them. If you only know the middle guy, don't bother (and for shame!); if you know and like all three, you've probably already seen and blogged about the movie anyway.
Staid pacing and standard shots held a few beats too long to hit the comedic sweet spot show up Green’s inexperience in mainstream generic moviemaking. His direction here exhibits nothing so much as that least attractive of stoner attributes: a sluggish inertia.
With its focus on actors and the movies, Tropic Thunder emerges as Stiller’s grand rumination on two obsessions, Hollywood solipsism and our pop education.
Characters that cling, with ever-whitening knuckles, to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder are nothing new within the realm of American independent cinema, yet Hunt’s triumph here lies in her presentation of the American underclass milieu as a viable cinematic universe without succumbing to pious fetishization or thinly veiled distaste.
Claude Chabrol again goes about dissecting the vanities and hypocrisies of the rich and/or famous with A Girl Cut in Two, the latest of his nearly annual socially satiric potboilers.
It’s honest, beautifully subdued, and, up until a lame departure from Roth’s original ending, tough.