Reviews
Sympathy for the devil is a common theme in the recent crop of Nazi and Holocaust films, with Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise both imbuing varying degrees of good will in their goose-stepping characters.
Cargo 200, its title ostentatiously taken from a code word for military casualties during the ill-fated conflict in Afghanistan, and nominally based on a true story, posits another era of madness in mid-eighties, pre-Perestroika Soviet Union.
Tom Cruise was supposedly drawn to the role of German Resistance hero Claus von Stauffenberg when he noticed how much he looks like the Nazi.
The movie is driven by a restless curiosity, but it occasionally suffers from a corresponding superficiality.
The handiwork of Eric Roth, best known for Forrest Gump, is evident in this prestige production, a decades-spanning epic whose singular premise and piercing loneliness are ultimately overwhelmed by a soggy script trafficking in counterfeit lyricism.
Last Chance Harvey, the second feature from writer-director Joel Hopkins (Jump Tomorrow), a meet-cute romance for the silver set starring Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, aims to attract the same filmgoers who made Something’s Gotta Give a hit back in 2003.
Let’s put it plain: in any sane world, Revolutionary Road would be laughed off as a joyless embarrassment before we moved on to more pressing business.
This heady stew of foreign cuisine, family squabbles, and international cinema is a potent, if familiar one, and while most films play this combination for universalist, heart-warming chuckles, The Secret of the Grain is as po-faced as its wizened and weary protagonists.
How does one avoid overly aestheticizing violence when using animation?
It’s as if, for decades, Eastwood has been positioning himself as a brooding man’s Leonard Zelig or Forrest Gump, a witness to all of America's wrongs who’s been trying to live them down ever since.
In the first place, The Class is a welcome corrective to a significant omission in the vast majority of junior high or high school movies—actual classroom activity.
Early in the documentary 30 Century Man, Scott Walker recollects his first visit to Sweden, in which he came to the horrific realization that vulgarity exists even among Scandinavians.
We can all agree that democracy’s messy any way you cut it, and Lurie’s filmmaking certainly follows suit; on a very concrete level, there’s just more movie here than the director seems up to juggling.
Even though the film seems a trifle proud that it’s based on fact (an opening title card informs that “The story you are about to see is true”), What Doesn’t Kill You’s experiential personal involvement does distinguish it from its generic makeup.