Reviews
Certainly one can’t recognize the film’s central movie-in-the-movie, a ridiculous indie melodrama called “Home for Purim,” as reflecting current Hollywood trends, yet the egos, desperations, and compromises that the crew goes through in For Your Consideration are instantly recognizable.
The late-October appearance of Running with Scissors on screens around the country may well be the most ominous and crass declaration that cinematic Fall ’06 has begun.
I made a solemn vow five minutes into watching Koko: A Talking Gorilla for the first time, which went something like: “Any time I am having a bad day or start to feel blue in the slightest, I will pop on this DVD to help me remember that life is a curious and wonderful gift.”
Kerrigan’s work is unrepentantly unpleasant, a formal and thematic assault on institutional depictions of mental illness.
Provocation, in case you hadn’t noticed, is the comedic instrument of the moment.
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.