Reviews
Brothers is deserving of accolades for rethinking the genre but is, sadly, unlikely to garner anywhere near the same amount of fawning adulation as that which greets high-profile macho counterparts like Saving Private Ryan.
Would it be heretical to suggest that the early films of Yasujiro Ozu are richer than his canonical work? This isn’t to impugn the later films, of course: the mature Ozu is one of the unquestioned glories of the cinema.
What’s left is just lowlife burlesque aimed squarely at folks who lap up real-life tough-guy ‘toons like Bukowski and bird-flicking, posterized Johnny Cash, a straight whiskey, no chaser hard-living fantasy for big kids who think 50 Cent’s too black.
Writer-director Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose, is so gorgeously photographed, so thoughtfully performed, and so relentlessly sincere, you can almost overlook how truly awful it is.
To the growing cadre who’ve immersed themselves in the current landscape of lesser-known Japanese cinema, Kurosawa’s films remain as relevant and as highly anticipated as those of his internationally-praised contemporaries Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano.
James Munro’s Street Trash is a careening, runaway dump truck of gore, raunch, racial slurs, and slapstick whose narrative hinges on a liquor store owner’s scheme to drive away pesky homeless patrons by selling them a discounted case of fetid malt liquor.
Kings and Queen was one long, effervescent gush of cinema in a year when the medium dearly needed a shot of spirit; maybe that’s enough to account for the general outpouring of critical goodwill that greeted its arrival onscreen.
How Before Sunset deeply affects so many people can’t be so easily defined.
It’s worth noting that I only know one person who didn’t like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
For the last 20-odd years, James L. Brooks has compiled an oeuvre whose defining feature has been its shallow conception of cinema’s possibilities.
If anyone tells you that Million Dollar Baby “isn’t really about boxing,” they’re doing a disservice to the film and overlooking its central achievement. It’s all about boxing every second, every frame.
Set in the halls and caverns of a haunted movie palace, Goodbye, Dragon Inn doesn’t afford its audience a glimmer of natural light throughout its slender 81 minutes.
Tsai's films engage a whole mythology of distance and doldrums—one so inclined can extrapolate psychological echoes of Tennessee Williams, Dostoevsky, and Charles Schulz's Peanuts.