Reviews
Don’t let the anecdotal nature of the now 102-year-old Portuguese auteur’s most recent films fool you, however. His rigor and precision—and canny sense of how to lull and then delightfully frustrate an audience—remain intact.
One can only hope that the ludicrous ratings scandal doesn’t distract from Derek Cianfrance’s haunting work itself, which is powered by a simple yet surprisingly effective narrative gimmick.
If you took Ikiru, added a dash of The Sixth Sense, a dollop of A Woman Under the Influence, and then topped it off with a pinch of El Norte, you might end up with something resembling Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful.
Never one to shy away from controversial subject matter or to give audiences an easy ride, Bruno Dumont willingly walks into an ideological minefield for his latest, Hadewijch.
The early teaser of True Grit that played before last summer’s Inception presented staccato shots of glowering cowboys raising heads and six-shooters from the shadows, cocking them at quivering defenseless victims, and muttering cryptic macho dialogue.
A defiantly 2-D, hand-drawn cartoon in a 3-D CG world, The Illusionist tells the story of an over-the-hill magician who, at the end of the 1950s, finds himself increasingly irrelevant to audiences, a dying breed of performer who cannot compete with the upheaval the rock-and-roll sixties are about to usher in.
Lee Chang-dong’s protracted yet endlessly involving tale of grief and regeneration is a classically tailored assemblage of small, clipped moments, prizing the intricacies of human behavior but also acknowledging it as remote and difficult to define.
The worst response to a film as enormous as Shoah may be to box it in with mere words. Though citing the faults and fissures of language is perhaps a critical crutch, here the slipperiness of signification is operative within the very makeup of the work itself.
The least interesting movie of Russell’s interesting career, The Fighter was someone else’s passion project.
Julie Taymor is a filmmaker fascinatingly, infuriatingly at odds with herself. Each of her four features contains an essential, somewhat patronizing, gesture toward accessibility.
Dunst has some of the most dreamily sad eyes in movies today, effervescent when alight with joy and cutting when dulled by despondency; and she is matched in expressivity by Gosling, whose slightly weary baby blues offer flashes of the closely-guarded private worlds alive in his characters’ heads.
So, thanks for accompanying me last night to The Nutcracker in 3D from the director of Tango and Cash... I woke up this morning with visions of Gestapo rats and immolated toys dancing in my head.
From our vantage point in 2009, the film feels a period piece, some kind of elegy for those hazy pre-surge summers of 2005 or 2006 when casualties were at their height and the war promised to loom large over upcoming elections.
Resist the urge to check out of Tiny Furniture after the first twenty minutes. The winner of Best Narrative Feature at this year’s SXSW Film Festival (natch), writer/director Lena Dunham’s second film begins with enough self-satisfied tics to make even the hardiest filmgoer break out in indie-smirk hives.