Reviews
t’s boring and full of despicable characters, it suffers greatly from plotline packrat syndrome, and is frustratingly bent on lending credence to stereotypes about Germans’ lack of humor and poor taste in pop music, perhaps, but it’s also fairly derivative.
Winter Soldier centers on a single meeting on a single day in 1971 when the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War assembled more than 125 soldiers in a Detroit hotel to recount atrocities they’d either committed or witnessed.
Robert Altman never makes claims for greatness; each new release portends nothing more than another 100-something minutes of Altman, no larger, no smaller.
But seriously, why isn’t Leonard Cohen onstage himself, performing his own songs rather than these self-serving, insufferable egomaniacs?
Hey, kids, do you like violence? Well, step into to the multiplex exploitation circuit, circa 2006: flip, Grand Theft Auto nihilism, a bulging pocketbook, and Quarterback-blandsome leading man, Paul Walker.
Ensconced in scandal from production to release and beyond, Viridiana further cemented Luis Buñuel’s status as Surrealist legend.
In the company of so powerful and graceful a work of human empathy, criticism itself hardly seems relevant.
Based on a popular manga by Toru Shinohara, the Scorpion series was transmitted to celluloid with its pulp origins (virtues and limitations) very much intact—there isn’t a single character anywhere in these films whose psychology might chafe at the limitations of a comic frame.
The spy genre may have already reached the point where it’s spawned enough spoofs to outweigh its straight-ahead franchises.
When I try to find the words to praise Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, the first thing I think of isn’t quite a compliment: it’s a scab I can’t stop picking.
The Jackal of Nahueltoro is about six murders. Five of them take place during the film’s most troubling scene, as Jose, the protagonist, beats to death a recently fatherless family who have adopted him into their fold.
Whatever reputation the film has is derived from the same logic that’s sponsored Haneke’s career, the cough syrup argument—something that tastes so bad surely has to be good for you.
Inasmuch as Blissfully Yours has a point, it is this: the quality of sunlight shining through water or filtered through a forest’s canopy, the meditative quality of sex outdoors during a perfect day, the so close, so faraway sweet sadness of lying beside someone.