Reviews
I would be remiss to not admit my own biases toward the subject matter. I grew up on the Space Coast, and it was a common occurrence for me to see rockets launch into the bright Florida sky.
As a straightforward genre picture, it's plodding and dull, but as timely political intervention, it's too diffuse. Elah ends up being about many things and nothing at the same time.
Warner can only hope for cultural amnesia for this to work: Cruising remains a work of unparalleled, unedifying discomfort.
It’s a film of intangible uniqueness, a gentle, almost comforting lyric on the amorality of childhood and the promises of a New Spain emerging from fascism.
Poor acting and directing, of course, offer ample ground for complaint. Yet the greatest offenses of The Nanny Diaries arise not from its gross ineptitude, but in its underlying ethos.
Late one night on a deserted subway platform, a lost Jamie (Erin Fisher), dwarfed by the Tati-like expanse of Brooklyn’s multi-level 7th Avenue F train station, stops the sole nearby traveler, hoodied Charlie (Chris Lankenau) and asks for directions to a local diner.
The drastically polarizing nature of Dumont’s work comes not from any gleeful subversion, or insistence on rubbing our faces in putrescence (arguably Gaspar Noé’s at times admittedly intoxicating work falls more squarely here), but rather from its philosophical origins.
Superbad locates itself in a typical suburban high school, where the specter of potential humiliation is ubiquitous, from the lunchroom to the soccer field to cooking class.
Progressing beyond the earlier fumblings of Kissing on the Mouth and the more subtly developed LOL, the director harnesses in Hannah the fleeting emotional frequencies of everyday interaction for which he’s been striving.
The film is content to dwell on the heart-on-sleeve shabbiness that Hawke has embodied since Reality Bites, confident enough to risk awkward intimacy in its depiction of the blossoming, then shriveling relationship between twenty-year-old actor-in-New-York William Harding and singer-songwriter Sara Garcia.
For the sake of my faith in humanity, I’m going to refuse to accept that, and consider this an aberration, a relic of a bygone, less enlightened era. Moviegoers of America: please prove me right.
Though 2 Days in Paris purports to ultimately be an Annie Hall–ish elegy to lost relationships, Delpy and Goldberg cannot create enough of a poignant interaction to make their falling apart matter.
Though it’s the second Kino compilation assembled from the archives of experimental film promoter and collector Raymond Rohauer, Avant-Garde 2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954 could easily be subtitled “Beginnings.”
