Reviews
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.
Re-watching it gives the frustrating awareness of how comparatively petty many of the experiences I have—and have had—with movies are, how a diet of mediocrity accustoms me to betraying a natural expectation that art can expand its frame into the world I'm living in.
Frank Tashlin poked fun, some would say too slyly, at the infantilism of an earlier, atomic age of super-sized culture by working in its idiom.
Imagine if David Lean had awakened one day and announced, “I want to make the best damned blaxploitation flick ever.” Would that be any weirder than seeing Zhang Yimou’s Hero for the first time?