Reviews
With Lemon Tree Riklis aspires slightly higher, focusing on a practical deadlock in another geographical twilight zone: a fight over a lemon tree grove placed on the green line border between Israel and the Occupied Territories.
Part tribute to A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett and part comparative chronicle of both the 1975 original and 2006 Broadway revival of his Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Every Little Step covers a lot of ground in 90 minutes.
Not every chintzy Hollywood comedy that comes down the pike need be held up as an example of the State of Contemporary Entertainment, but a film like Jody Hill’s pretend-flippant, zeitgeist-baiting Observe and Report practically begs for serious consideration.
The rhythms of this story, while ploddingly familiar, are made digestible by Caine’s rapport with Milner—not exceptional in itself, but credibly touching enough without being cloyingly sentimental.
With his likeable, sentimental narratives, Majidi has been somewhat simple to write off, then, as his takes on family and tradition cross cultural borders with ease, resulting in some critics’ accusations of patronization, if not moralism.
Dreams and aspirations linger below the dusty surface of Tulpan, and each of its characters expresses a secret desire for something that seems to lie just beyond the arid landscape's distant horizon.
Two tired, and seemingly opposed, trademarks of recent American independent cinema make for a deadly combination in Matt Aselton’s Gigantic. It’s an arch, self-aware puppy-dog love story, shot through with an overly aestheticized, almost clinical detachment.
Mathew Kaufman and Jon Hart’s documentary about Plato’s Retreat, American Swing, runs up against an old conundrum: the juicier the story, the messier the film. The leap from printed word to moving image removes the anonymity factor.
Even if the general level of the production represents a leap, the whole is still marred by a disturbing undercurrent that’s made most of the postgraduate naturalists seem generally insignificant—there’s no danger here, little seems at stake, and there’s hardly a sense of how these lives are impacted by the world at large.
Being John Malkovich, it turns out, has its pros and cons. While most agree that Malkovich is a talented actor, few in Hollywood have really tested his range, preferring to use him as either terrifying or downright weird.