Reviews
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.
Though Bronson, about England's most notorious inmate, fights and sweats to furnish some sort of point out of its menagerie of beat downs and stylistic gambles, it ultimately fails.
Intended as a romantic comedy for the indie set, Peter and Vandy—written and directed by Jay DiPietro and based on his play of the same name—starts out promisingly enough despite its predictable predilection for Pitchfork-sanctioned songs.
No one likes a big, meaty ferbissenah punim more than Joel and Ethan Coen.
Min Ye… (Tell Me Who You Are) is the Malian director's first feature in over a decade, and it comes to us, as do many films from contemporary Africa, partly due to European funding and technical support.
The film opens on a small marketplace in the Philippines before the turn of the 20th century. It’s shot in a very specific quality of luminescent black-and-white that reminds of certain 1920s and 30s Hollywood cinema—gauzy, diffuse, a little dreamy.
For his part, Wajda sits back and doesn’t disrupt focus or tone by moving the camera closer to his actress for easy emotional effect.
Afterschool plays like a film student’s demo reel of the various ways to signify “alienation”—shallow depth of field, over-lit sterile interiors, ambient sounds of fluorescent light hums, expressionless actors, methodical tracking shots frequently overrunning or catching up to their human subjects.
From a critical perspective, the reasons why a contemporary film director would adapt a nationally famous piece of proletarian literature from the twenties are less important than how he chooses to bring it to the screen.
The joke of Diablo Cody’s screenplay is that Fox’s anodyne Jennifer Check—a high school goddess who overcomes the obstacles of an ID-checking bartender by volunteering a game of “hello titty”—finds her inner ugliness externalized after being possessed by a demon.
Repeated viewings of Paradise reveal a transfixing and richly patterned patchwork, but on the first try it feels like alien territory, and it can be difficult to find one’s way in.