Reviews
In its depiction of the outcome of World War II, Tarantino doesn't just provide revisionism, he implicitly, and winkingly, acknowledges the subjectivity of film historicity.
The Baader Meinhof Complex, produced and adapted by Bernd Eichinger (who also wrote Downfall, which chronicles Hitler’s last days) from a book by journalist Stefan Aust, attempts to dramatize the events that led to the group’s abrupt rise and slow but noisy fizzle.
My One and Only, directed by Richard Loncraine, follows the trio as they navigate a series of potential suitors and long stretches of Route 66; predictably, their journey doesn’t quite proceed as planned.
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.