Reviews
You are what you fuck”—or how you fuck, at least—seems to be the basis of any contemporary exercise in analytical artistic truth seeking. Probably the closest equivalent to writer/ director/ star Caveh Zahedi’s fidgety new self-exposé comes from underground comix, that most purely onanistic of artistic subgenres.
Melville’s tough-guy mannerisms in movies like Le Doulos, Le Samourai, and Le Cercle rouge always strike me as impenetrable and faintly ridiculous, even though I admire the films’ visual elegance and deadpan noir rhythms.
The humane accomplishments of the film, widely praised, do not need much defending, but I think it’s been insufficiently expressed how closely the experience of the film comes wrapped with a dissatisfaction belied by this mood of critical exultation.
The Dardenne brothers’ L’Enfant has been justly hailed as a brilliant work, but for gritty observational verisimilitude The Death of Mr. Lazarescu outstrips it at every turn.
Since Paul Greengrass decided to make a crude, mechanistic schematic out of the events of 9/11 and the crash of United 93 rather than a full-bodied film with some small shred of humanity, it seemed most appropriate to build a response around a list rather than a complete review.
To say that the Dardennes never fail to deliver on their formula is hardly meant as negative criticism.
The second part of a planned “American trilogy,” Manderlay revisits the spare soundstage set-up of Dogville, albeit with new chalk lines and a different cast.
Criterion’s lavish double-disc treatment of La Haine gives ample testimony to the film’s importance, not only to recent French cinema but also to contemporary French society.
What distinguishes Peckinpah’s “real” WWII story from his movies of peacetime warring? Only that diplomatically sanctioned combat is much, much bigger, louder, dirtier, bleaker, and blacker than anything his other films imagined.
For the avid Bob Fosse fan of a younger generation, there’s always been a viewing gap, as far as his brief but peerless directorial career is concerned.
There’s no sober realist tract squeezed between the film’s ten show-stopping numbers set in “New York City” aka Culver City, CA, but It’s Always Fair Weather is deprecatingly funny and downbeat, and has a pensive melancholia which, if not entirely adult, is on the way there.
What evidence exists of artistry comes through in its atmosphere. The film is shot, more-or-less throughout, with a lens that leaves the image foggy on all four sides, with only an oval in the middle of the frame in crisp focus.
Alan Moore may be greatest victim of Hollywood’s comic book adaptation craze.