Reviews
German-Turkish director Fatih Akin’s penchant for over-peppering his plots with contrivance and forced convolution would seem to have found the perfect fit in the high-decibel comic confection Soul Kitchen.
Unlike Olmi’s more straightforwardly realist depiction of the hopeful beginnings of a clerical worker en route to a humdrum existence in his heartachingly lovely breakthrough Il Posto, Wooden Clogs—which won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1978—contains moments of idyllic allure.
Manoel de Oliveira’s Eccentricities of a Blonde Hair Girl, huggable at 64 minutes, occupies the filmmaker’s by-now familiar nether-Lisbon, in which lives are lived simultaneously in 1609, 1909, and 2009.
Canadian writer-director Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time, like her last feature, Sabah: A Love Story, superficially explores Arab and Western relations on a microcosmic scale, as played out in a romance between a man and woman gazing at one another from across the cultural divide.
While on its very thin surface Samuel Maoz's feature debut takes Israel’s ill-considered 1982 invasion of Lebanon as its subject, the film is more Rear Window than Platoon, and gives new meaning to the phrase “theater of war.”
Typical of the writing and pacing in director Aaron Schneider’s film is a line from the funeral director’s assistant, drawn out for so long that sighs from the audience are audible between his pauses: “You wanna be at your funeral. Party. Alive? But. You can’t have a funeral if you’re not. Y’know. Deceased.”
The problem for Countdown to Zero is how to address the issue cinematically. The threat of nuclear destruction has been endlessly treated in the movies as both theme and MacGuffin ever since Hitchcock’s pre-Hiroshima production of Notorious.
Sally Potter’s marvelous 1992 film of this undeniably strange, altogether wonderful book now makes its way back to theaters after a digital restoration, and in a bleak cinematic landscape, this oddball film feels especially vital.
Given the infrequent cinematic output of Terry Zwigoff, bitter, parodic, button-pushing misanthropy is rarely represented at the local art house. But Solondz has not helped fill the void. If anything, he precipitated it.
Since his parched but accomplished 2000 debut, Following, the British-born writer-director has been compared to Stanley Kubrick, and not because he has an awesome beard (he doesn’t). Like Kubrick, Nolan revels in the visual possibilities of remove, and is inclined to linger on agony more than ecstasy.
Not long into Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Viking film, Valhalla Rising, the main character, the mute and mutilated One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), beheads an opponent with the rope that tethers the cyclopean brute to a post in the ground.
Escapist in the truest and least perturbing sense of the word, this conceptually gentle but artistically bold fiction-documentary hybrid takes viewers to a lush, vivid natural world—the second largest coral reef on the planet, the Banco Chinchorro to be exact, located in Quintana Roo, Mexico.
Viewers of Slovak filmmaker Péter Kerekes’s rather banally titled documentary may be pleasantly surprised to find not an orderly history of cooking, moving methodically, dish by dish, from past to present, but rather an attempt to actually cook history via cinematic slicing, dicing, stirring, and simmering.
Rivette works in miniature, gracefully orchestrating a modest story set against the backdrop of Saint-Loup Peak, a geological marvel crowning the genteel Languedoc region of southern France.