Reviews
The biopic, however uninteresting, is among the most schizophrenic of film genres: at the level of performance, the push is always towards verisimilitude—imitation in speech and gait, appearance, and, when the subject is a musician, song—while at the level of narrative, there’s an almost mechanical adherence to formula.
In its detailing of the aftermath of a tragic hate crime in Rheims, France, Beyond Hatred so utterly avoids gratuitous horrors, exploitative grief, and moral grandstanding that those expecting a traditional cine-postmortem will be baffled.
Day Watch may be a lousy vampire movie and an aggressive assault of light and sound, but beneath all that it’s also a brilliant essay on justice, gender, class, and politics in contemporary Russia.
The predictable irony of the horror revivalist bandwagon is that the oft-mentioned imperative to “get back to basics”—which typically means evoking some fantasized notion of “the Seventies”—belies the fact that this new breed of would-be fearmongers are actually doing something quite new and complex.
Besson unambiguously stated that he aimed to capture the “true, beautiful Paris, the one that enthralls millions of tourists every year and we, Parisians, walk past every morning, head down, lost in our personal paradise.”
How apt that the movie is about the ineradicable—yet unrecoverable—past. Henry Fool left us with the image of Thomas Jay Ryan’s title character, a fugitive from the law, making a dash for a plane.
Severance is therefore also, like Hostel, given to ill-advised “chickens coming home to roost” political commentary.
This is a film for the cool, detached viewer who nevertheless craves a powerful emotional experience—just enough distance, no more than will prevent vicarious thrills.
This is what makes the movie so profoundly frightening: though she is willing to commit this heinous act, we recognize that we can, and in fact do, sympathize with her.
There may not be much radically new in Tsai's approach to camerawork and storytelling, yet the film's distinct naturalism feels worlds away from his previous, almost metaphysical stylization. Perhaps it's because he's back home.
Like their unabashedly geeky protagonist, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies are not hard to like. Budget and box office may mark them as efficient money-printing machines, but Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were so unfashionably square that they seemed like anomalies when stacked up against their summer superhero competition.
If Jindabyne doesn’t quite coalesce like its taut predecessor, it comes close enough; its unevenness is made up for by its ambitious wanderings through trickier, thought-provoking terrain, and, although it goes slack occasionally, clocking in at just over two hours, the film resonates with rhythmic momentum.
“It is an innovative digital filmmaking collective financed by IFC to produce ten low-budget digital feature films. InDigEnt is dedicated to the community of filmmakers looking to experiment and expand into digital filmmaking.”—InDigEnt mission statement
Wright and Co. are of the age to have suckled off the usual suspects of 1990s film buff-dom, and it shows: the Coen Brothers and Sam Raimi in the bravura slapstick, the New Zealand films of Peter Jackson in the lavish splatter f-x and parochial approach to American genre.