Reviews
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.
Despite Pedro Almodóvar’s reputation for portraying sexual outrageousness and deviance, most of his films are pretty straight.
The title, Gardens in Autumn, evokes stopping, if not to smell the roses, then at least to watch the leaves change color (Iosseliani himself shows up onscreen as the man who tends that garden).
Barring the fact that you have to be primed for blood and ghoulishness, there’s nothing that should keep most people from being thrilled by Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin Dada impersonation and the attendant madness that marked the dictator’s reign.
Given its mercurial tendencies, Matador demands rapt and unwavering attention, and not a little bit of patience, because one is never sure of a moment’s disposition (or position with respect to the whole) until that moment has fully played itself out.
As the more familiar forms of the political movie tend to vacillate between broad-stroke caricature and puerile romanticization, there is something bracing about The Queen‘s transposition of inflated-into-distortion public figures into unsensational, speculative private lives.
Through no fault of his own, the man who may well be Korea’s most talented contemporary filmmaker has by now earned himself a regular seat at the small unmarked table off to the side of film culture designated for those directors who traffic in “festival films.”
To responsibly account for the interminable woes of an entire continent is a lot for a lone filmmaker to shoulder. But Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako has done so in his latest, Bamako, and has succeeded.
Before Little Children, I had no idea that our most outwardly benign enclaves are tainted by…by…philanderers, both male and female; pedophiles; mail-order johns; gays (!); and transvestites (!!)—in short, sexual deviants of every imaginable stripe.
Law of Desire feels vibrantly young, and appropriately on the edge of total control, whereas Volver feels like a massively orchestrated work. Both films are largely the better for their respective handlings.