Reviews
There’s something personal and intimate about Eastwood opening the film this way that stands in stark contrast to the crass awards pandering we’ve come to expect from most American filmmakers at this time of year.
The director cut his teeth as a still photographer, and his HD Cam-shot Climates feels appealingly, obsessively handmade; passages in our protagonist's dim hotel room seem as diaristic as Stephen Shore’s seventies road-trip photos.
A variety of sources, all reliable, informed me that Insiang is Filipino filmmaker Lino Brocka’s masterpiece. Yet I emerged from the NYFF press screening completely baffled by this consensus.
In addition to displaying a rather glib, arch comic sense, maladroit filmmaking that latches store-bought arty obliqueness to lastnightsparty.com vacuity, and a string of clumsy historical parallels (celebrity=royalty or something), Coppola’s film is solipsistic, shrilly melodramatic, and stunningly barren of human observation.
Perhaps in an effort to be taken more seriously, Goldthwait tries to mix keen observational comedy with heartbreaking family melodrama, which results in a somewhat unholy alchemy.
Our sellout Saturday night crowd at the midtown Manhattan multiplex couldn't even wait for the screen to go black to erupt into unanimous applause. It was the most thoroughly “taken for a ride” bunch I've ever been a part of.
The follow-up to the grandiose and lavish spectacles of Gangs of New York and The Aviator is a darkly comic and blood-filled gangster film that runs strictly by the book… plus cell phones
Interesting to consider that Reds very closely followed the debacle of Heaven’s Gate and was in gestation for a good many years prior (reports say that multihyphenate auteur Warren Beatty began shooting interviews with the film’s “witnesses” as far back as the mid-seventies).
It’s Lynch’s strangest and most difficult film—that’s not saying a little—since Eraserhead. And it’s the film of the year.
he Host is everything Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds tried and failed to be: a seamless, rough-intrusion-of-the-fantastic B-movie with a hard and real glint of contemporary relevance and resonance.
Lattuada plumbs material that a director like Visconti would mine for social realism, and takes a much more lighthearted view.
If Private Fears in Public Places came without the Alain Resnais imprimatur attached, nobody would dream of screening it outside the Francophone market—this isn’t a slam on the movie, but it’s worth noting.
If cinema’s highest, most proper calling is as the ultimate repository for images, dreams, and mad, unkempt visions, then El Topo could well be argued as the most quintessentially cinematic film ever made.
If Pedro Almodóvar has become Almodóvar, an instantly recognizable brand of world art-house authorship, it’s precisely because he invests each of his films with such an accessible intertextual pedigree.