Reviews
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.
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.