Reviews
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.
Clocking at roughly two hours, Honeydripper drags us through high cotton, Christian burials, and tent revivals, stopping along the way to allow each citizen of Harmony to relate a back story.
If Atonement registers as a disappointment, unmet expectations can be partially ascribed to outsized anticipation.
The movie operates under an eccentric narrative logic that’s usually called, for lack of anything better, “dreamlike.” (Not less than three times while watching it I was on the verge of giving in to a very pleasant slumber, but that’s fine—I liked the “going under” lull.)
In the documentary Nanking, directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman piece together the tragic story of the Japanese army’s sacking of the titular Chinese city during World War II using, in part, newsreel footage and emotionally wrenching interviews with survivors and former soldiers.
On a narrative basis, Forster and screenwriter David Benioff keep things moving briskly and fluidly, and the actors are emotionally compelling enough that it’s easy, in the moment, to overlook the film’s central thematic dubiousness and specious cultural elisions.
Juno is occasionally funny, rarely intelligent, and often annoying. A crowd-pleaser for people who like to think they’re above crowd-pleasers but are actually not, it’s going to be huge.
Like its protagonist, Jennifer Venditti’s acclaimed documentary Billy the Kid is both pretty hard to dislike and difficult to parse.
Though it’s both a predictable culture-clash comedy and a gentle plea for people of different political backgrounds to “just get along,” The Band’s Visit nevertheless manages to use its central contrivances and inevitable clichés to its favor, and becomes something ethereal and winning.
It’s not inconceivable that the single poet often attributed to the “official” recorded text of Beowulf might have been aware that in the very process of committing to parchment a mess of real historical figures, locations, and occurrences blended with freshly imagined interpretations of traditional legend and fictions he was performing an utterly new act.
Point of view gets a major ocular workout in Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which forces viewers to identify so fully with its paralyzed main character that even the peripheries of the frame seem like unapproachable boundaries.
No grand artistic summation or even a proper refining of pet themes and motifs, Paranoid Park finds Gus Van Sant further whittling on the same piece of wood. It must be a nub by this point.
If Southland Tales is indeed reflective of “these times of ours,” with its doomsday rhetoric and heightened pop culture grotesquerie, then it’s simply part of the problem, replacing a possible space for conversation with more cheap bombast (disguised as self-critique).