Reviews
Our sellout Saturday night crowd at the midtown Manhattan multiplex couldn't even wait for the screen to go black to erupt into unanimous applause. It was the most thoroughly “taken for a ride” bunch I've ever been a part of.
The follow-up to the grandiose and lavish spectacles of Gangs of New York and The Aviator is a darkly comic and blood-filled gangster film that runs strictly by the book… plus cell phones
Interesting to consider that Reds very closely followed the debacle of Heaven’s Gate and was in gestation for a good many years prior (reports say that multihyphenate auteur Warren Beatty began shooting interviews with the film’s “witnesses” as far back as the mid-seventies).
It’s Lynch’s strangest and most difficult film—that’s not saying a little—since Eraserhead. And it’s the film of the year.
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.