Reviews
The Counterfeiters is the bread and butter of the Academy, not to mention film festival audiences everywhere, and as such, seems to have been designed solely to win plaudits.
If Paddy Chayefsky and Newton Minow had ever bonded over too many cocktails—secretly spiked by Neil Postman—the result might have been The Signal, a grungy warning to anyone who would rather watch than engage.
Romero has often traded in rather glib social satire since the revelation of his 1978 Dawn of the Dead; whereas Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter’s genre work has mostly been greeted with retrospective praise and analysis, Romero’s never made any bones about his intent.
For a director drawn to neurosis and insecurity, Michel Gondry is remarkably sure of himself. Insistently idiosyncratic and unworried about self-indulgence, he seems unable to second-guess his ideas—which would be a problem if his ideas weren’t so inspired.
This gloom is all quickly dispelled once Edward and Carter fully recover from their treatments and surgeries. They know they each only have roughly a year to live, but they don’t let that stop them from becoming unusually spry old men again.
Once again, with his new film The Witnesses, great French filmmaker André Téchiné surveys the intersections of sexuality and politics, while offering up a compelling study in human strength and weakness.
As with his earlier Unknown Pleasures and The World, Jia Zhangke’s masterful Still Life is shot on digital video and skirts the line between documenting its nation’s transitional woes as it moves towards promised free-market independence, and creating fictional narratives around these events.
Though Anderson structures his nearly free of dialogue, suggesting the evocative power of silent cinema (everything we need know about Plainview can be discerned from the film’s prologue), it’s not long before he introduces the familiar trappings of the great American epic There Will Be Blood is to become.
Rather than “open up” the action, as most stage-to-screen adaptations insist on doing, self-consciously and self-defeatingly knocking down walls simply because they can, Burton keeps the action, and the camera, close.
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.)