Reviews
The premise of The Dukes is solid: the members of a doo-wop group, successful in the Sixties, are now loosely associated as losers, struggling to make alimony payments and working as line cooks in somebody's aunt’s restaurant.
One can’t accuse director Yair Hochner of not giving his target audiences what we want: in the opening fifteen minutes of the Israeli filmmaker’s ensemble dramedy of hook-ups and hang-ups among a small group of gay men in Tel Aviv, he fills the screen with all manner of groping titillation.
The kids are cute, shots are stylishly skewed, cuts are whip-quick, and rousing remixes of M.I.A.'s ubiquitous "Paper Planes" pop-pop and ching-ching throughout. Poverty can be so much fun.
Everything’s at the threshold in A Christmas Tale. Holiday time, transition, reunion, naturally, but also disease and surgery, grudge and reconciliation, degeneration and regeneration.
A helpful shortcut for negotiating the heaps of texts in this modern world: all attempts to give something familiar or antique a self-consciously edgy, gritty makeover can be, de facto, written off as terrible.
Kevin Smith’s career is one of the mysteries of American film culture. He’s eight movies into his career—eight!—and he has shown zero progress.
The film dispenses with metaphor in favor of a gritty realism where, far from being exceptional, vampires must struggle along with everyone else in the bleak, near-perpetual darkness of a Swedish winter.
Synecdoche, New York opens with a scene of finely observed domestic squalor. A suburban home rouses itself for the day. A middle-aged man declares “I don’t feel well” before sitting down to breakfast.
Changeling is a musty lament for something long gone—a lost child perhaps, but more so this sepulchral cinema of quality. Watching it, one can only try to locate whatever semblance of life remains, then tramp the dirt down.
Like any omnibus film, the Christophe Jankovic and Valérie Schermann–produced French collection of creepy, crawly cartoon shorts, Fear(s) of the Dark, succeeds on the strength of its best components.
The best compliment that can be paid The Universe of Keith Haring is that it is as inspiring at the level of a cinematic portrait as its subject was at the level of pure creation.
Cinema—its real and ersatz versions—is as much a subject of Chouga as are the tragedies and epiphanies of romantic love. Omirbaev's film is ostensibly an adaptation of Anna Karenina, an efficient reduction of 800-plus pages of text into less than 90 minutes of film.