Reviews
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.