Reviews
The most Kuleshovian horror movie in recent memory, Sinister consists often of shots of Hawke, alone in a room, simply watching and responding.
Santos and Erika make an odd pair. He’s a dying hitman who’s just left his hospital bed for a whirlwind tour of old haunts and new prospects. She’s his much younger traveling partner, having leapt into his passenger seat after a gas station spat with her boyfriend.
Anyone baffled and disappointed by Lines of Wellington—a bloated, hastily composed Napoleonic epic prepared by Ruiz and completed by his widow and longtime collaborator and editor Valeria Sarmiento—needs to take a more sober glance at Ruiz’s oeuvre as a whole.
Throughout, the filmmaker works in a style not dissimilar from—though less droll than—that of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the best-known Turkish director in the U.S., whose Once Upon a Time in Anatolia graced the New York Film Festival main-slate lineup last year.
Set along the Mekong River, which marks the border between Thailand and Laos, the latest film from Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul is a vaporous film that’s a borderline in and of itself.
As in her previous film, Fish Tank, Arnold is far more attentive to the nervy tempos of teenage life, caught in fleeting glimpses, than the lifeless and disappointing adults against whom her characters rebel.
Watching Here and There, the Mexico-set debut feature by the Spanish-born Antonio Méndez Esparza, one might anticipate a big-event sucker punch, as frequently occurs in films showcasing festival-circuit realism with a strong sense of place and a societal-problem subject.
Air of sober intimacy notwithstanding, Amour, which won the Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Haneke’s second such honor in only three years), is a horror film.
It turns out that Jarecki’s amalgam of Miller’s real-world counterparts is more of a bid to scramble audience sympathies (by now, Buffett and Madoff couldn’t have more divergent public profiles) than a rather crude entrée to financial-crisis commentary.
The processional quality of There Will Be Blood has been replaced by a subtler and more sophisticated structure that gives the few money shots (and this being an Anderson film, you know there will be money shots) a higher currency.
Even though his latest, the autobiographical Keep the Lights On, which charts a tortured ten-year relationship between two men, is his first New York–set movie, where Sachs has lived since he relocated in 1985, it also takes the shape of an outsider’s story.
If Compliance seeks to sift through the events to help us make sense of how they could take place and we leave still rather incredulous, then on the whole it must be taken as a failure.
What if one of the world’s great film artists released her first major, feature-length narrative in nearly a decade, one based on the writings of a revered author firmly entrenched in the western canon, and no one noticed?
Killer Joe is like a fairy tale scribbled in the margins of a dirty joke book. Letts is a romantic of the Tennessee Williams school—it can’t be love if it doesn’t have claws.