Reviews
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.
Through his own obscure, serpentine passageways, Mizoguchi charts the various fates of his protagonists as they struggle under the social and economic burdens of their occupation.
Now out on DVD from the Criterion Collection after years in limbo, Kicking and Screaming has lost none of its hilarity or grace.
To be in the hands of a Mizoguchi is to experience something singular and undeniable; there have been many great filmmakers, but there are only a few who are great in the way Mizoguchi is great—instinctively, insistently, almost primally.
In short, Mizoguchi and Ugetsu’s immortality are assured; to write of either from a newly illuminating angle is not.
only Talk to Her (and most of All About My Mother) manages to bypass all the possible snags of the slightly overdetermined Almodóvar shtick to become truly intoxicating.