Reviews
There’s a tantalizing whiff of mediocrity to Boarding Gate, and it’s consistently set off by high levels of self-awareness and undeniable craft.
The director’s produced an entire film out of loose ends, scrutinizing female faces in silent repose, which seems the quintessence of his cinematic experiment: how much can you extract from looking hard?
In the last several years, moviegoers have been inundated with films—narrative and documentary features alike—that depict the decaying soul of the individual in the service of corporate ambition, but I can recall no such work as dark or morose as Heartbeat Detector.
4 Months is considerably more incisive in this regard, partly because of Mungiu’s empathy with his characters and perhaps because of the relative touchiness of the debate into which he enters. But Li's film is nonetheless forceful and provocative, even if it fails to strike as deeply empathic a note.
David Gordon Green shows his condescending hand early in Snow Angels. A high school marching band plays slovenly and moves in lockstep to a familiar-sounding pop hit on a football field in the cool winter air of some Everysuburb, USA.
Snow Angels, the fourth feature by the preternaturally visually gifted, yet often narratively scattershot filmmaker David Gordon Green almost begs to be disliked.
The entire project suffers from the gall Haneke shows in not only remaking his own film for the “edification” of a wider audience, but in trusting his own original vision so fundamentally and without question that he has chosen not to append or alter it in any significant way.
Stephen Chow was at least at one point the biggest star in Asia; he may still be. As an actor, he’s affable, equally conversant with extreme physical comedy and action melodrama. As a filmmaker, his approach is endearingly idiosyncratic.
I didn’t laugh at any point in this comedy, so-called, but this isn’t as big a deal as one might think, because except for a few hard-brake punchline stops, the movie puts more of a premium on being likable than hilarious
As restless and flashy as the radicals it valorizes, Chicago 10 is an apocalyptic dispatch from the past refashioned as a slick flyer for the present.
As in his stunningly assured debut, Man Push Cart, Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani uses Chop Shop not to sentimentalize the travails of one of NYC’s multitudinous, ignored underclass, but to discover, as Arthur Miller once said of The Bicycle Thief, “Everyman’s search for dignity.”
Vantage Point is pure fantasy, more concerned with churning out a satisfying resolution through narrative gimmickry than bearing out hows or whys. But as a mishmash of current political concerns, the film can’t help but seem exploitative.
David Rice, the protagonist at the center of Doug Liman’s Jumper, possesses the mysterious ability to teleport anywhere at whim. We quickly discover, however, that he exploits his limitless potential for decidedly narrow purposes.