Reviews
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.
At 53, with one Palme d'or under his belt, von Trier is too old and established to be called an enfant terrible. Nevertheless, he's built a career on controversy. His artistic relevance has always depended more or less on his capacity to get a rise out of his audience.
It’s tempting to see Spike Jonze’s last film, Adaptation, about a screenwriter’s inability to find his footing in translating Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, as a sort of anticipation of his missteps with Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence bedtime classic Where the Wild Things Are.
Deciding which short is the worst can provide its own kind of fun, as an email thread with a friend proved, but it's hard not to single out Brett Ratner's garish tale of virginity lost.
Sebastián Silva’s The Maid begins as a wry look at the fault lines between domestic familiarity and class disparity and gradually morphs into a kind of blackly comic quasi-monster movie, before segueing into an empathetic, restrained tale of personal growth.
Jonathan Parker’s high art send-up (Untitled) practically begs crippling questions about its own existence: for instance, to whom is such a film supposed to appeal?
There is little room for palpable emotions to flourish under the gloomy, brushed steel skies and oppressively muted palette of An Education.