Reviews
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.
In the context of a jingoistic or indifferent media, putting “assassination” in a title is transparent titillation, the promise of a Falling Down for liberals with the frisson of sedition.
Like his 1963 masterpiece Contempt, Notre musiques rigorous examination of cinema as fallible super-medium builds subtly into a powerful wave of hope, even despite itself.
With Birth, Jonathan Glazer saves critics the troubling of anointing him a filmmaker to watch—he enacts the benediction for them, with every attention-grabbing shot and ostentatious directorial gesture.
Death is present, literally, and tonally, from the first frames of The Machinist, subtly emanating from the washed-out darkness of the fluorescent-lit palette of blues, greens, and grays, which lends a murky, underwater complexion to the film's industrial wasteland setting.
When a film as bad as The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu's remake of his own 2002 Ju-On, makes so much damned money ($40 million in its opening weekend), it's pertinent to ask “why?”— preferably bellowing from one's knees, arms open to the dark and indifferent sky.
Leigh takes his examination of the “back alley” abortion a step further, replacing the commonly imagined horrors surrounding the practice (see a recent example in the dreadfully overwrought The Crime of Father Amaro) with something closer to warmth, even love.