Reviews
Updating the private investigator film with September 11 shadings is not a terribly novel idea, but writer/director Noah Buschel isn't an idea man.
All of this is really a polite way of saying that lately, Almodóvar has gotten a free pass from critics, who received his last two movies, Bad Education and Volver, with (too much) enthusiasm. They’re both sensuous, smartly conceived films, but they also trip over their own ambitions.
Financed by the state-owned China Film Group Corporation to the tune of $80 million, John Woo's Red Cliff is the latest “most expensive Chinese film ever made,” following quickly upon such prior contenders as Curse of the Golden Flower and Hero.
Much can be said about the concept and implications of globalization. That it’s good for corporations, indifferent to local economies and cultures, rough on the working class. Here’s another: globalization inspires very bad art.
There are few American filmmakers currently working who are more fastidious about composition than Wes Anderson, and in a sense he has been making animated films all along.
n all fairness, it should be said that there is much to enjoy in Pirate Radio, notably a few set pieces in which Curtis the writer really comes into his own, as well as that overarching sense of bonhomie that infects all Curtis productions and makes watching them akin to eating a big cheap candy bar.
That some of the most beautiful passages in the English language become mere means to an end in Zemeckis’s film rather than its necessary emotional centerpiece—the chestnut dressing rather than the roast goose, let’s say—is the first clue as to where the director’s sympathies ultimately lie.
In reality, what should be said of The Box, especially in the wake of Southland Tales, is that when it comes to Richard Kelly there’s no there there, and likely never was.
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film in about as many years, and his second about dance (after 1995’s Ballet), begins with a series of shots of Paris, immediately establishing the renowned company as subject to the city’s daily grind.
Chris Smith’s often unnerving documentary Collapse arrives as something of a minor key paranoiac balm. Based on real events and plausible conjectures, its world crisis feels terribly immediate.
As on Oprah, the lesson is ready to be had: we reap the inspiration of Precious’s empowerment without going through the fire.
Mira Nair’s Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia will easily be criticized for simply being the kind of film that it is.
Hong Sang-soo’s latest, Night and Day, opens by misdirecting its audience with a credit sequence scored to the allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
“What Does Motherhood Mean to Me?” wonders Eliza, Uma Thurman’s harried West Village mother of two, as she works her way through a day of tough city living in Katherine Dieckmann’s Motherhood.