Reviews
Like the absurdly giant fish that lumbers through the water in the opening sequence—a CGI creation meant to evoke a rubbery, low-tech effect—Tim Burton’s latest film, Big Fish, seems burdened by contrasting demands.
First and foremost, Jackson’s series reaffirmed that bigger can, in fact, be better, and director’s cuts can, indeed, be more than mere bouts of auteur narcissism.
I can only stand so much awkwardly delivered voiceover about making peace with a barely known father figure before growing a little skeptical of a documentary’s motivation, especially when said figure is a luminary on the level of Louis Kahn.
Upon returning from Cannes with a Palme d’Or in tow, Elephant was not infrequently assailed stateside as incomplete and inchoate, excoriated for all the things it of which it wasn’t enough: it wasn’t enough of an answer, it wasn’t enough of an insight, and frankly, it wasn’t a film of enough substance.
The film is an elementally emotional work, flooded everywhere by a deep, regretful sort of fatalism.
Each new decade lays its own claims to surrogacy over the global village. If ever there was a movement to locate it firmly, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 should be the standard-bearer for the first decade of the 21st century.
Von Trier’s elegantly angry Dogville, despite its predilection for audience-goosing, is an exhilarating pilgrimage into Darkest Human Nature, as emotionally exacting as we’ve come to expect from the director, and as insinuating as well.
This all goes back to American Splendor’s simplistic formula for the presentation of reality and unsentimental truth: take traditional “Hollywood bullshit” values and flip-flop them with pancake precision, as in Joyce and Harvey’s first date, an absolute catalogue of a-romantic catastrophe.
The movie can’t seem to relax and forget that it is Ozon’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged female detective novelist; suffice to say that the book that Sarah Morton finally produces in the aftermath of her vacation is our movie, Swimming Pool.
Spellbound, the documentary by Jeffrey Blitz, is the equivalent of a Matisse in a Mickey Mouse frame.
Japón is perhaps the most original and striking debut feature I've seen in the last half-decade or so. It has the feel of a first film that came out exactly how its director wanted it to.
In Hollywood, where profit margins are worked through to the tenth decimal before any celluloid gets to be exposed, and where every incoming product proudly wears its demographic on its sleeve, the appearance of a big-budget born loser like Willard is anomaly enough to make anyone take notice.