Reviews
Those hoping that I’m Not There, with its splintered Dylans encompassing different portions of the man’s career, is the ur-text that will provide a greatest hits of a life (like a Ray or Walk the Line) will be sorely disappointed with Haynes’s more ambitious project.
Margot is shocking for containing nary an event or interaction that corresponds to anything resembling real life, and this from a director often so good at representing the sad hilarity of awkward moments.
Expensively mounted without being overly glossy (credit here to grit maestro DP Harris Savides, on one hell of a run) and populated almost entirely by familiar faces, it pivots on a well-established postulation: the mobster (or pusherman) as late-capitalist avatar.
Drawing faithfully, this non-reader assumes, from the source novel, the Coens occupy themselves with the necessary, functional questions that so many thrillers (even the good ones) gloss over.
Somewhat into Sidney Lumet’s remarkable Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead there’s an astonishing, wordless scene: Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lumbering account executive for a real estate firm, slowly dismantles the interior of his Pottery Barn catalog condo.
Looking to the far from conventional Slipstream, it appears that writer/director/star/composer Sir Anthony Hopkins lacks that avant-garde gift. I suspect most viewers will find that the only enduring outcome of Hopkins’s admittedly bold but nonsensical film is an acute headache.
Ben Affleck can do little wrong by me, but it's difficult to say why. A resume with lowlights as low as Reindeer Games, Pearl Harbor, and Gigli and highlights as modest as Good Will Hunting and Hollywoodland can't be the answer.
Reservation Road is too lethargic and inept to capitalize on its thriller tendencies or substantially invest in the emotional shadings that might help fill in the spaces between. Character interactions boil down to a series of clichéd crescendos.
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.
Thee Farrellys naturally amp up the gross-out factor every chance they get, which, in this film, only alienates us from characters that were, originally, painfully easy to identify with.
In Persepolis, episodic stories give Western readers and many others a glimpse into a fascinating world during a tumultuous era, and the author's illustrations express the caricatured, exaggerated impressions of a young child.
Our era’s omnipresent symbol of how far the U.S. has fallen, and how precarious the Western world’s dominance is when up against the ideological conundrum of the Middle East, the Iraq war has proven a challenge for our political artists.