Reviews
Ostensibly a glimpse at the disrupted lives of three young brothers under the thumb of their tyrannical father after the death of their mother, Three Dancing Slaves is more of a treatise on postadolescent male angst and the stranglehold of dominant masculine roles.
Grizzly Man is a battle between two antagonistic voices—Herzog and Treadwell—with one common denominator: an uncontrollable craving for existential excess.
Whether explicitly or subtextually, all movies are about memory. Due to the alchemy of emulsion, film footage is memory made material, and, when projected, animate.
A wondrously humane and strangely spiritual odd-duck of a movie, Junebug incisively gets at all that unspoken complexity existing in the spaces between family members by treating them as just that: spaces, gaps, blind spots.
As genially foulmouthed as one would expect, given a collaboration with the writer and star of Bad Santa, Bad News Bears is about as charmingly unchallenging a film I’ve seen in ’05, which may sound like faint praise coming from a serious critical journal like the one you’re currently reading.
9 Songs is one of the most sexually explicit films to play in mainstream theaters the world over, albeit with limited distribution—the inevitable triple-X ratings it will receive here and there will be indispensable free publicity.
When a friend recently noted that my taste in horror flicks tended toward the “grim and serious,” I had to balk—we’re talking about horror movies after all! But I may be in a minority by virtue of taking that grimness for granted.
Tim Burton is one of the better pop-circus ringleaders and more unremarkable artists that American movies have to offer; evidence of both tendencies is much available in his Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
As I am both a fan of the music of Jim White and a junkie for all things Southern, news of the travelogue Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus elicited from me a cry of “Now that’s my kind of movie!”
Gone are lingering shots trained simply on the sight and sound of unrelenting falling rain and, in place of long stretches of naturally foreboding silence, this rendition inserts bad mother-daughter bonding banter.
How better to make a movie on love, trust, and desire than by example? Yet Tropical Malady’s plunge into the jungle asks us to set aside our own narrative desire for the romance between the two young men to work out on its slow but sure naturalistic path.
Ultimately, Nolan’s film is a triumph of casting: fan-types have been clamoring for Christian Bale since American Psycho. Because really, what is Patrick Bateman if not the slightly crazier, NC-17 version of Batman: a fantastically endowed sociopath-playboy in thrall to his deep-seated obsessions?
The Star Wars brand name fills the screen then recedes into the cosmos, trailed by that famous crawl of backstory, while John Williams’s familiar score oversees the proceedings with the pomp of a graduation recessional.