Reviews
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films are haunted by the specter of death—from the exquisite undercurrent of loss infusing Maborosi to the explicitly gimmicky conceptualization of the hereafter in After Life to the looming danger hovering over the abandoned children of Nobody Knows.
Need it be said that The September Issue would likely not exist if not for The Devil Wears Prada?
While some would call it middlebrow, I prefer to think of the Lee-Schamus project as classical. Director Ang Lee and screenwriter-producer James Schamus construct traditionally plotted stories in which characters struggle to be, become, and love.
For American audiences only familiar with Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s animation through the Walt Disney–trademarked theatrical releases his last few films have received in the U.S., Ponyo, his latest feature, might seem a change of pace.
Although each section could work as a freestanding piece, Palfi invites the viewer to recognize visual and textual rhyme, and he modulates tone within as well as between the sections.
In each of Martel’s first three features, a mysterious incident confounds characters and viewer alike, setting a tone that the Argentine director sustains yet also narratively subverts.
Schwentke and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin manage to make it as linear as possible, skipping forward over years of courting, marriage, childbirth; only the narrative propulsion feels surreal. By design the film should float off into the ether; mostly it stays despairingly grounded.
Cloud 9 makes a spectacle of the very thing it intends to demystify. Namely: geriatric sex, which the film seeks to make mundane by refusing to shy away from the sight of its elderly principals engaged in graphic simulated rutting.
Taxidermia is a drunken, lumbering lout of a movie. It grabs you by the scruff of the neck, gives you a noogie, belches in your face, and slaps you on the back.
In his new film Yasukuni Chinese director Li Ying locates the physical and spiritual embodiment of Japan’s relationship to its own history at the Yasukuni War Shrine in Tokyo, where the souls of the 2.46 million soldiers who died fighting for their country are said to dwell.
Godardian teenage angst paean or super-sized Keystone Cops episode? Or perhaps Gerardo Naranjo’s I’m Gonna Explode is just an unholy mix of both.
If Ephron’s screenplay—adapted from Powell’s book Julie & Julia and Child’s My Life in France, which she cowrote with Alex Prud’homme—possesses an almost brazenly low amount of dramatic conflict, it also isn’t larded with prebaked career-or-husband contrivances found in so many female-centric Hollywood films.
If there’s any sense of uniformity across the three films in his oeuvre thus far—Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation, and now Beeswax—it’s that he somehow manages to direct all his nonprofessional actors to the same hyper-dull communication level.
The character actor's curse is the risk of being—no, the need to be—constantly self-parodic, cartoonishly repeating the quirks and ticks of a role allotted to him by popular taste (or uncreative casting agents).