Reviews
Only so much can be done with the source material for Spike Lee’s new film. Repellent and deeply stupid, Park Chan-Wook’s decade-old revenge thriller Oldboy is too high on its own bad-boy attitude to be genuinely shocking, and too mean-spirited and bullying toward its audience to be truly enjoyable.
One couldn’t ask for a more Nietzschean antihero than Faust, the intellectual uber-mensch who, his carnal desire awakened, shakes off his guilt and affirms his ego. Faust’s character is so unbound that it is at times confounding.
Much of the film, set at the University of California, Berkeley, feels like one long administrative meeting, an experience that is simultaneously mundane and anxiety-provoking.
Four tableaux and two book-ends form Jia’s candid portrait of contemporary China, about the tragic injustices experienced by the nation’s underprivileged workers.
Blue is so universal in its portrayal of love, so honest about the role that sex plays in becoming an adult, and so painfully accurate in capturing that hollow feeling that follows losing someone against one’s will, that the experience of the film transcends flaws both real and imagined.
The characters that Noujaim selects for The Square prove to be more than symbolic, or bricks in the wall of the movement—they are major players in it, brainstorming ways of expressing and popularizing their goals simultaneous to the film employing them to do the same.
Three movies into his second career as a feature filmmaker, McQueen has leveraged his obvious skills as an installation artist into becoming the modern master of a certain kind of set piece—the literal show-stopper, in which the movie grinds to a halt to beg our applause.
If nothing else, Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915 proves that a movie star really is a completely different animal than the rest of us schlubs.
Escape from Tomorrow cannot seem to decide whether it wants to satirize its protagonist’s midlife-crisis buffoonery or position his erratic behavior as somehow symptomatic of an amorphous psychic malaise within the park itself.
Handmaiden of the hegemon or stealth critic of the same? There is evidence for each side in the case against Paul Greengrass.
It’s a disturbing testament to Denis's artistry that the most plangent impression left by Bastards is of its beauty, even as it is ultimately her most horrifying film since the cannibal holocaust that is 2001’s Trouble Every Day.
An efficient, technically audacious hour-and-a-half survival narrative, Gravity demonstrates both a spectacular formal ambition and a single-minded, bordering on simplistic, narrative focus
One of the enduring canards of that devilishly intractable film-critical tick known as auteurism is the notion that a certain filmmaker has obsessions, idiosyncratic (and, ideally, perverse) fascinations that find their way, almost furtively, into their movies.
What is more unforgivable than the dilatory, cynical waste of talent dribbling off the screen in Rush is that some critics appear to have fallen for its superficial charms (period cars! sex! third-degree burns!) and are content to overlook its structural deficiencies, not to mention its fundamental pedestrianism.