Reviews
For all the chatter about Quentin Tarantino’s cultural sampling and border jumping between high and low art, his (white) elephantine opus acts more like a colonizer, staking out a self-contained retro-vacuum where our hunger for art in American movies can thrive on faith divorced from accomplishment.
Pitt’s personality vacuum as Achilles means that we don’t particularly care if this super soldier goes along. Meanwhile, as Troy is governed by the doddering old fool King Priam (played by that expert doddering old fool, Peter O’Toole) and its young prince Paris is, basically, a self-absorbed knob, there’s not much reason to care about its citizens’ fates.
I wish that I could say “mission accomplished,” but my mouth is currently full of fried fish goodness. Consider it a perverse act of junk food solidarity from me to you, Mr. Spurlock. May it bring you fond memories of Day Eight.
This transient quality, however, is both Maddin’s great strength and ultimate weakness. His films are more to be dreamed upon than watched; the individual works are nowhere near as potent as the half-imagined whole they constitute.
Say what you will about Tarantino’s loving appropriation of B-movie tropes, grindhouse thematics, and kung-fu culture, but don’t be so quick to overlook the second installment’s characterization, a cagey evolutionary leap from the frenetic, hack-and-slash avatar development of Vol. 1.
Let’s start with the title: Dogville. A village of dogs. That’s what von Trier curtly deems this great nation of hucksters and hypocrites and religious fanatics.
Written, directed, produced, lit, shot, and edited by Ceylan, it easily lends itself to auteur association, and its disengaged, articulate imagery, spread across unhurried takes, has the sheen of willful artistry.
Son frère chronicles the slow deterioration of a diseased thirtysomething, the concurrent rebirth of a brother’s bond, and may be among the filmmaker’s most affecting works to date.
Horror cultists, willfully clandestine and fiercely territorial, will doubtless be appalled by this latest multiplex spin-off of George A. Romero’s Dead series, something of a sacred text for the gorehound crowd.
For a film that so fondly recalls Germany’s recent socialist past, Good Bye, Lenin! is awfully materialistic. As political as a pop tart, as full of product worship and as breezily incoherent as a VH1 retro special, writer-director Wolfgang Becker’s first stateside release is a valentine to East Berlin—western style.
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s newest feature is called Crimson Gold, but it could just as easily share the name of his previous movie, The Circle. Both banned in their home country, they harbor the same vision of a circumscribed society.
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.