Reviews
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.
Encounters at the End of the World is the latest missive from world cinema’s Marco Polo / Jack London / Great White Image Hunter, Herr Werner Herzog, out for a deserved large-screen airing before entering its inevitable Discovery Channel rotation.
Take away Argento’s undeniable craft, and what would you really be left with? The answer is Mother of Tears.
At any given moment, Operation Filmmaker feels both refreshingly linear and enthrallingly multilayered: the subject, like the film, is difficult, charismatic, maddening, repellent, and sympathetic all at once.
Mongol marks a personal first for this reviewer: a bloated epic so boring and unengaging that by its numbing conclusion (the word anticlimactic can only be used for stories that actually build) he was zapped even of the conviction to hate it.
Playwright John Guare must have had Indian director Tarsem Singh (or as he’s often simply known, Tarsem) in mind when he wrote about the increasing exteriorization of the term “imaginative”: “Why has ‘imagination’ become a synonym for style?”
If you've ever yearned to watch (as well as hear and practically feel) Academy Award nominee Stephen Rea writhe gorily in windshield glass for the better part of 85 minutes, Stuck is your movie.
Prince Caspian is all shallow iconography: a parade of portentous images just nondescript enough to have Narnia newbies like myself wondering what exactly the big deal is.
Savage Grace is such a jarring, atonal experience that it doesn’t much help to try and put definitions on it; that might be the point—“perversity,” “incest,” “matricide,” all become mere buzzwords, unrelated incidentals in a vast interiorized conspiracy of psychological damage
Falling somewhere between a specific personal essay and a more vaguely targeted social commentary, Bell’s documentary, a freeform exposé of steroid use in the U.S., is, somewhat inevitably, a product of narcissism and insecurity.
Let the overstuffed The Edge of Heaven be a lesson: Just multiplying and magnifying your obsessions does not make them any more powerful.
As a document of testimonials from those who otherwise dare not speak, and for whom being gay is like being born, inextricably, into the lowest possible caste, A Jihad for Love is invaluable.