Reviews
Those searching for fresh evidence that the collective obsession otherwise known as “the crisis of masculinity” remains alive and kicking: look no further than Hesher.
For viewers on the mainland, City of Life and Death is an unprecedented opportunity to see one of the most devastating episodes in the nation’s history elevated through a universalizing, readily exportable cinematic language.
Stripped of his powers and biding his time in a tiny New Mexico town that looks like it consists of one dusty block, Hemsworth turns out to be a real stand-up guy, charming as he smashes coffee mugs with pleasure and grunts to the waitress for more drink.
Taking a camera crew into the restricted recesses of Chauvet, the German director becomes docent to the damnedest gallery you’ve ever seen.
The “Delicious” of that grotesquely awkward title is Dean O’Dwyer, a paraplegic Angeleno living out of his car who DJs under the name Delicious D. Thornton, himself wheelchair-bound with a broken back, plays D as a mostly unlikable cauldron of resentment and self-pity. He has reasons to be surly.
The Robber is a rare urban survival story less preoccupied with social issues than the human body and its physical limits.
It is a unique experiment in film, blending street theater, archive documentary footage, newsreels, and, most controversially of all, the lip synching of audio interviews with Dunbar’s family, by actors, filmed in representational form as if they were speaking the very words to camera.
Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies—an operatic saga of intergenerational woe—is the cinematic equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters game, with brazen contrivances and a preordained outcome repurposed as dazzling spectacle.
I guess it’s interesting to note that the biggest difference between this perfectly well made and completely superfluous third sequel and its now-fifteen-year-old source material is the degree to which the principal characters are film-literate.
The resulting superficies often jangle and tingle, but the film’s vision of adolescence as fairy-tale espionage remains tastefully hollow, with its young heroine’s storms of violence increasingly becoming as calculated as any of Shirley Temple’s tap dances of pouting and sniffling.
African cinema is generally woefully overlooked by the West, and the filmmaking being done in Republic of Chad has been particularly invisible.
The expanses of the southwest have never felt quite the way they do in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, at once a summation of and an evolution in the director’s depictions of the American landscape—indeed, in her filmmaking overall.
Rodrigues ultimately transcends his film’s shortcomings by taking a sincere approach to classic queer questions of aesthetic sensibility, community, and spirituality.
At this point, writer-director Duncan Jones at least has an artistic identity. He’s a mildly clever sci-fi conceptualist in thrall to a single conceit: perplexed characters caught in experiential loops.