Reviews
Park’s latest, Thirst, is a vampire film, coming at a time when consumers seem at peak hunger for such things. This savvy befits a filmmaker who populates his movies with Xtreme incident to maintain outsider cachet, while still slavishly remaining in thrall to convention and trend.
Lorna’s Silence, while as lean and tight as any of their films, is also closer to a traditional narrative than they’ve ever been, with its curt, pointed scenes that push the story forward, its reliance on the close-up (rather than their patented over-the-shoulder POV style), and its occasional shot/reverse shot set-ups.
If ever a movie called for a patented millennial ALL-CAPS live-blogged text review, it would have to be Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan, or, as it will likely forever be known moving forward, OMG, DID YOU SEE ORPHAN WTF?!.
California Company Town is an unusual creature in the world of modern documentary film. It is shot on 16mm, has no characters, no interviews, and consists of so many still shots that it most closely resembles experimental landscape films.
About 70 minutes into You, the Living, we get what would seem to be a visualization of Zevon’s contention that “Except in dreams, you’re never really free.” What appears to be a static image of a newlywed couple in their apartment is revealed as an impossibly complicated traveling shot.
It’s hard to imagine a receptive audience for Max Mayer’s Adam as anyone other than moony-eyed thirteen-year-old girls—not that Fox Searchlight would ever admit that this should be its target demographic.
In the early Nineties, writer Neale Donald Walsch was living in a tent and surviving on recycled can money. He had a broken neck, a broken marriage, and a burnt-down house. Then he turned to God, and found Him surprisingly chatty.
In the Loop is an ammonia-scented satirical critique of those British politicians star-struck by Washington in the build-up to the Iraq war.
Brüno touches upon all of these subjects, plus racism, the swinger lifestyle, lousy parenting, international politics, and more, tackling such a random menu of issues that it feels both overstuffed and underdeveloped at the same time.
Among contemporary action-fantasy franchises, the Harry Potter films are unique for the multiple directorial voices behind them.
