Reviews
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).
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.