Reviews
There’s an unexpectedly graceful scene midway through when Brady discusses his concept of God: akin to flawlessly parallel lines, a concept of perfection that human beings can conceive of while simultaneously knowing they will never experience it within the corporeal world.
In television director Pascal Chaumeil’s cable-ready Heartbreaker, Romain Duris, all matted hair and pit-stained shirts, practically emanates an odor of Roquefort through the screen as Alex Lippi, an unctuous young man making a career of wooing women out of unsatisfactory relationships.
At this point, it’s safe to say François Ozon is clearly neither the rabble-rousing enfant terrible he first seemed nor the stealth subversive mainstream filmmaker he might have evolved into.
For a good 20 minutes or so, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s experiential documentary Sweetgrass appears to be predominantly about sheep.
A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop manages the headache-inducing feat of both amplifying the Coen Brothers’ worst directorial tendencies and mixing them with Zhang Yimou at his most bombastically hollow.
This isn’t a real documentary, of course, and it’s not even the TV show Ghost Hunters, which suspends judgment either in favor of or against the otherworldy. It’s a horror film, and by speaking those words, Marcus effectively seals his fate.
Llosa’s sophomore effort, which also won the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin film festival, never succumbs fully to cliché. Fausta’s confidence grows intermittently; each step forward comes at a price.
After 243 minutes of film, spread over two parts, the audience for Jean-François Richet’s much heralded and decorated 2008 movie (three Césars, including Best Actor and Director) could be forgiven for wondering wistfully how Godard’s version might have turned out.
Narrative will show up in footage taken by an unmanned surveillance camera or a satellite, not to mention when there are humans deciding what’s in the frame and for how long, and what ends up on the cutting-room floor.
International culture-clash movie narratives used to be about bridging gaps, language barriers, righting wrongs, learning, healing. How times have changed.
Watching Mao’s Last Dancer, Bruce Beresford’s adaptation of Chinese-Australian ballet star Li Cunxin’s memoir, you might find yourself forgetting that ballet is an art.
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.